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.
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.
How do I check whether Bingbot can read my site right now?
Two checks, both needed: read your robots.txt for a group naming Bingbot (or the * group it falls back to), then request your homepage with Bingbot's user agent and confirm you get a 200 with your real HTML rather than a 403 or a challenge page. SeeGeo's free crawler check runs both in a few seconds.
How does Bingbot compare to similar crawlers?
Bingbot is one of 16 crawlers the SeeGeo audit checks individually. The closest comparisons:
| Crawler | Operator | Role | Runs JavaScript? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bingbot | Microsoft | search engine crawler | Delayed rendering |
| Googlebot | search engine crawler | Delayed rendering |
Why does crawler access matter? The numbers
Crawler access is where AI visibility starts or ends: a blocked crawler can't read you, and an AI that can't read you can't recommend you.
- Visitors arriving from AI assistants convert at roughly 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search on average (Semrush, cross-industry, 2026).
- AI-assistant referrals are still only about 1% of total web traffic — small, but the fastest-growing acquisition channel measured (multiple 2026 studies).
- Adobe Digital Insights (Q1 2026) measured AI-assistant visitors converting 42% better than non-AI traffic — a full reversal from the year before.
- Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default for many accounts, so sites are often invisible to AI without anyone having decided to be.
- Content edits alone — statistics, citations, quotable structure — can raise AI visibility on the order of 30–40% (Princeton GEO study, KDD 2024).
Frequently asked questions
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.
Can Bingbot read my website?
Only if two things are true: your robots.txt does not disallow Bingbot, and your server or CDN actually serves the page when Bingbot asks. Firewalls can block it regardless of robots.txt, so the reliable way to know is to fetch your homepage as Bingbot — the free check on see-geo.com/ai-crawler-check does exactly that.