What is Bingbot?

What does Bingbot do with your content?

Bing's crawler. Also feeds AI assistants that use Bing's index (including parts of ChatGPT's search), so blocking it hurts more than Bing. It follows the rules you publish in robots.txt, a small text file at the root of your site that tells automated visitors what they may read (defined by RFC 9309, the Robots Exclusion Protocol standard).

Should you block Bingbot?

Blocking Bingbot removes you from more than Bing: AI assistants that draw on Bing's index — including parts of ChatGPT's search experience — lose access to your site too. For almost every business, Bingbot should stay allowed.

How do you allow or block Bingbot in robots.txt?

Add one of these snippets to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. The first explicitly allows Bingbot everywhere; the second blocks it completely.

# Allow Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /

# Block Bingbot
User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

Is robots.txt enough?

Not always. CDNs and firewalls (Cloudflare in particular) can block crawlers at the network level regardless of what robots.txt says — Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default for many accounts. If you want Bingbot to reach your site, check your CDN's bot settings too. SeeGeo's free audit checks both.

What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is Microsoft's search engine crawler. Bing's crawler. Also feeds AI assistants that use Bing's index (including parts of ChatGPT's search), so blocking it hurts more than Bing.

Should I block Bingbot?

Blocking Bingbot removes you from more than Bing: AI assistants that draw on Bing's index — including parts of ChatGPT's search experience — lose access to your site too. For almost every business, Bingbot should stay allowed..

Does Bingbot run JavaScript?

Bingbot can render JavaScript for indexing, but rendering is delayed and imperfect — server-rendered content is always the safer path.