What Is Bingbot?
Bingbot is the name of Microsoft's primary web crawler, the automated software agent that discovers, fetches, and processes web pages to build and maintain the Bing search index. When Bingbot visits your website, it reads the content, follows links, and reports back to Bing's indexing systems so your pages can appear in Bing search results.
The official user-agent string for Bingbot is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm). You can control Bingbot's access to your site through your robots.txt file using the User-agent: bingbot directive. Microsoft also provides Bing Webmaster Tools, which functions similarly to Google Search Console and gives website owners insight into how Bingbot is crawling their site, which pages are indexed, and any crawl errors detected.
The significance of Bingbot has grown considerably with the rise of Microsoft's AI products. Bing now powers Microsoft Copilot, which is integrated across Windows, Microsoft 365, and Edge. Content that Bingbot has successfully indexed and that ranks well in Bing becomes a potential source for Copilot's AI-generated answers. For South African businesses, this means that maintaining good SEO practices that allow Bingbot to crawl and index your site effectively can contribute to your visibility in AI-generated responses, not just in traditional Bing search results.
Bingbot respects standard crawl directives including the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive, which lets you limit how frequently Bingbot visits to reduce server load. You can also use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header or noindex meta tags to prevent specific pages from being indexed by Bingbot independently of Googlebot.
Bingbot In Practice
A Pretoria-based property listing site might notice Bingbot regularly crawling their pages in server logs. If the site has a well-structured XML sitemap and a clean robots.txt file, Bingbot will efficiently discover new listings, update changed prices, and remove sold properties from the Bing index.
However, if the site uses heavy JavaScript rendering to display property listings and has not configured server-side rendering or dynamic rendering, Bingbot may struggle to read the content. Unlike Googlebot, which has a sophisticated JavaScript rendering queue, Bingbot's JavaScript rendering capabilities have historically been more limited, meaning JavaScript-dependent content may not be indexed as reliably.
A practical step for any South African business serious about multi-platform search visibility is to register their site in Bing Webmaster Tools. This allows you to submit sitemaps directly to Bing, monitor crawl statistics, and identify any pages Bingbot is having trouble accessing. Given that Bing powers Copilot across millions of Microsoft devices used in South African workplaces, the reach of Bingbot-indexed content extends well beyond Bing.com itself.
What Bingbot is
Bingbot is the web crawler used by Microsoft's Bing search engine to discover, crawl and index web pages, the Bing equivalent of Google's Googlebot. Like other search engine crawlers, Bingbot systematically visits websites, follows links, reads page content, and gathers the information Bing uses to build its search index, so that pages can appear in Bing's search results. For a website to be found and ranked in Bing, Bingbot must be able to crawl it, so ensuring Bingbot can access the site (not blocked by robots.txt, firewalls or server issues) is a prerequisite for Bing visibility, just as Googlebot access is for Google. Bingbot identifies itself with a specific user-agent, and Microsoft provides Bing Webmaster Tools (the Bing counterpart to Google Search Console) for site owners to monitor and manage how Bing crawls and indexes their site, submit sitemaps, and see Bing search performance. Bingbot has gained broader significance because Bing's index powers not only Bing search but also other experiences, notably some AI search and assistant tools draw on Bing's index (for example, ChatGPT's web browsing has used Bing, and Microsoft Copilot is built on Bing), so being crawled and indexed by Bingbot can matter for visibility in those AI-mediated surfaces too, not just Bing search. Understanding Bingbot matters because it is how Bing discovers and indexes content, and because, given Bing's role in AI search, ensuring Bingbot can crawl and index a site has relevance beyond Bing's own search share, connecting to the growing ecosystem of AI tools that rely on Bing's index.
Bingbot, verification and its importance
Two practical questions arise about Bingbot: how to verify that a crawler claiming to be Bingbot is genuine, and how much Bingbot matters for a business focused on Google. On verification, because malicious bots sometimes disguise themselves with a legitimate crawler's user-agent, the reliable way to confirm a visitor is genuinely Bingbot is not to trust the user-agent string alone but to verify it by its IP: Microsoft supports verifying Bingbot through a reverse DNS lookup on the crawling IP address (which should resolve to a Bing/Microsoft domain) and a forward DNS confirmation, and Bing publishes guidance and its IP ranges for this, so a reverse-and-forward DNS check on the IP confirms whether the crawler is really Bingbot rather than an impostor. On importance for a Google-focused business, while Google dominates search share in South Africa, Bingbot is worth allowing and not ignoring for a few reasons: Bing still represents some real search audience, so being indexed by Bing captures that additional traffic at little cost; Bing Webmaster Tools offers useful, free insight; and, increasingly significantly, Bing's index feeds AI search and assistant tools (Copilot, and web-search features that have drawn on Bing), so being crawled and indexed by Bingbot supports visibility in those AI surfaces, which matters as AI-mediated discovery grows. So even a business focused primarily on Google generally should ensure Bingbot can crawl its site (not blocked by robots.txt or firewalls) and can benefit from using Bing Webmaster Tools, treating Bing visibility as worthwhile incremental reach and as a connection to the Bing-powered AI ecosystem, rather than something to disregard. For a South African business, the sound approach is to allow and verify Bingbot appropriately, and to maintain Bing indexing alongside Google, recognising that while Google is primary, Bingbot's role, especially its link to AI search, makes it worth attention rather than neglect.
FAQ
How do I verify that Bingbot is legitimately crawling my South African website?
Perform a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address in your server logs. Legitimate Bingbot IPs will resolve to a hostname ending in search.msn.com. Microsoft also publishes a list of Bingbot IP ranges that you can use to verify crawl requests.
Is Bingbot important for South African businesses focused on Google?
Yes. Bing powers Microsoft Copilot and other AI tools that are growing in use across South Africa. Content indexed by Bingbot can surface in AI-generated answers in Copilot, making Bing crawlability increasingly relevant for AI search visibility beyond just Bing organic traffic.
How do you verify that Bingbot is legitimately crawling your website?
Do not trust the user-agent string alone, since malicious bots can spoof it. Verify by IP using DNS: perform a reverse DNS lookup on the crawling IP address (it should resolve to a Bing/Microsoft domain) and then a forward DNS lookup to confirm it maps back to that IP. Microsoft publishes guidance and IP ranges for this. A matching reverse-and-forward DNS check confirms the crawler is genuinely Bingbot rather than an impostor.