Bingbot
Definition
Bingbot is a search engine crawler designed by Microsoft to crawl and index websites. The company launched Bingbot in 2010 to power its own search engine. According to the Cloudflare rating[1] where bots are ranked by the number of requests, Bing’s ranked as the 4th most active crawler. If you’re using Bing Webmaster Tools, you can check pages for crawl errors using Bingbot and manage the speed and timing of crawls.
How to verify Bingbot
Some web tools may pretend to be Bingbot, so you won’t block them in your robots.txt file. That’s why it’s recommended to use the Verify Bingbot tool to check if an IP address you found in your server logs and claiming to be Bingbot is in fact a verified Bingbot address.
To use the verify tool, simply enter the IP address of the bot from your server logs in the form and the tool will run the check.
If the tool tells you the suspect bot is not Bingbot, it’s recommended to blacklist and the block the IP address from accessing your website.
Bingbot user agent
Microsoft Bingbot uses different types of user agent strings, check some examples below:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36 Edg/W.X.Y.Z
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 Edg/W.X.Y.Z (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
In April 2022 Bing announced that the Bingbot user-agent string would be updated.
Desktop
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Mobile
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
How to control Bingbot
To control how Bingbot interacts with your website, you have two options:
Robots.txt files can be configured to tell Bing crawlers how to interact with your website.
Bing Webmaster Tools[2] allow you to control crawl rates by the hour using the Crawl control tool.
Importance for SEO
Although Bing is not as popular as Google, it is still one of the top global search engines, so it’s quite important for your SEO to be crawled and indexed by Bingbot. If Bingbot indexes your website, It can bring you additional visibility and organic traffic[3].