Microsoft · search bot · Last updated 2026-05-22
How to allow or block Bingbot (Microsoft Bing + Copilot ground truth) in your robots.txt. Why Microsoft Copilot visibility depends entirely on Bing indexing.
Bingbot is Microsoft's primary search crawler. It feeds both Bing search results AND Microsoft Copilot — Copilot is GPT-5 grounded in Bing's index, so anything not indexed in Bing is invisible to Copilot. Microsoft also operates BingPreview (snapshot previews) and the legacy msnbot. All three respect standard robots.txt rules.
Microsoft Copilot ships inside every Windows 11 install, every Microsoft 365 seat, and every Edge browser. For B2B brands selling into enterprise environments where Microsoft dominates, Copilot visibility is critical — and Copilot visibility is downstream of Bing visibility. Allowing Bingbot is the single most important move for Copilot citations. Blocking it makes the entire Microsoft AI surface invisible to your brand.
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Allow Bingbot on every site. Submit your sitemap.xml to Bing Webmaster Tools (separate from Google Search Console — Bing crawls more conservatively and benefits from explicit sitemap submission). Most brands underuse Bing because Google dominates traffic; for AI visibility, Bing is structurally more important than its 5% search market share suggests.
The exact directive to add to your robots.txt for Bingbot. Paste at the end of your file — bot-specific blocks override the wildcard above.
robots.txt
Copy and paste
# Allow all Microsoft crawlers
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /dashboard
User-agent: BingPreview
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /dashboard
# Legacy MSN crawler — still respected by some Microsoft surfaces
User-agent: msnbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /dashboardYes, directly. Copilot is GPT-5 grounded in Bing search results. When Copilot answers a question with citations, the citations come from Bing's top results. If you don't rank in Bing for the query, Copilot won't cite you — period. Bing visibility is upstream of Copilot visibility.
Yes, especially if you care about Copilot visibility. Bing Webmaster Tools is free at bing.com/webmasters. Verify domain ownership (Bing supports importing verification from Google Search Console — one click) and submit your sitemap.xml. Bing crawls more conservatively than Google so explicit submission accelerates index coverage.
Yes. Bingbot honors Crawl-delay directives more strictly than Googlebot. For sites with large URL counts, leaving Crawl-delay unset (or at 1) lets Bing crawl at its natural pace. Setting it higher than 5 seconds throttles your index freshness without benefit.
Bingbot crawls for the index. BingPreview generates snapshot previews (the thumbnail / quick view shown in Bing search results). Most sites allow both; blocking BingPreview removes your snapshot previews while keeping you in the index. Edge cases only.
No, not currently. Microsoft Copilot uses Bingbot's existing index rather than a separate AI-training crawler. This means Bingbot allow inherits to Copilot — there is no equivalent "Microsoft-Extended" opt-out for AI training while keeping search.
Cite this guide
BrandCited. (2026). Bingbot robots.txt — How to Allow, Block, or Audit. https://www.brandcited.ai/tools/robots-txt-auditor/bingbot
Each major AI engine operates one or more user-agents. Configure them in parallel for complete coverage.
robots.txt is one of dozens of AI ranking factors BrandCited audits. Run a free scan to also check schema completeness, llms.txt configuration, content structure, entity recognition, and AI citation share-of-voice.