Bing AI and Bing AI Chat User Agents

Introduction to Bing AI User Agents

Bing AI (Microsoft Copilot) operates several crawlers that index web content for its search engine and AI-powered services like Bing AI Chat. Understanding these user agents is crucial for website owners who want to optimize their content for Bing or control how their content is accessed.

Overview of Bing AI Crawlers

Bing uses five main crawlers, each with specific roles and user agent strings:

Bingbot

Bingbot is Bing's standard crawler that powers Bing Search and Bing Chat (Microsoft Copilot) answers. It uses several user agent strings depending on the context:

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

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

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)

Note: "W.X.Y.Z" is substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version being used, such as "80.0.345.0". Bing regularly updates their web page rendering engine to match the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge.

AdIdxBot

AdIdxBot is the crawler used by Bing Ads. It crawls advertisements and follows websites from those ads for quality control. Like Bingbot, it has both desktop and mobile variants:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko (compatible; adidxbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)

BingPreview

BingPreview generates page snapshots for Bing. It has both desktop and mobile variants:

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

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)

MicrosoftPreview

MicrosoftPreview generates page snapshots for Microsoft products. It has both desktop and mobile variants:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

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; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview)

Verifying Bing Crawler Authenticity

User agent strings can be easily spoofed, so not every request with the Bing user agent strings may come from an actual Bing crawler. To verify authenticity:

Check the user agent string first
Use the Verify Bingbot tool provided by Microsoft
Perform a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address
Check if the IP address belongs to Microsoft's IP range

Controlling Bing Crawlers

Website owners have several options to control how Bing crawlers interact with their content:

Robots.txt Configuration

You can use the following directives in your robots.txt file:

# Block all Bing crawlers
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /

# Block specific Bing crawlers
User-agent: adidxbot
Disallow: /

# Block specific directories from Bing
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members-only/

# Allow only specific directories
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /public/
Disallow: /

Crawl Rate Control

You can control crawl rates by the hour using the Crawl Control tool in Bing Webmaster Tools. This allows you to:

Set custom crawl rates during specific hours
Reduce crawl rates during high-traffic periods
Temporarily pause crawling if needed

Optimizing for Bing AI

To ensure your content performs well in Bing AI-powered services:

Use clear, factual information with proper citations
Structure content with appropriate headings and semantic HTML
Implement schema markup for better content understanding
Ensure your site has good technical SEO fundamentals
Provide comprehensive information that directly answers common questions
Maintain site performance and accessibility

Tracking Bing AI Visits

With xseek, you can track when and how Bing crawlers access your content:

Monitor Bing user agent visits in your analytics dashboard
Track which content is being accessed most frequently
Analyze how your content appears in Bing AI search results
Measure traffic referred from Bing chat to your website
Compare performance between different AI search engines

Related User Agents

Learn about other AI user agents to better manage your website's interaction with AI systems:

OpenAI User Agents - ChatGPT, GPTBot, and OAI-SearchBot
Claude User Agents - Anthropic's Claude AI assistant
Perplexity User Agents - Perplexity AI
Deepseek User Agents - Deepseek AI
Llama User Agents - Meta's Llama AI