Bingbot

Bingbot meaning in English

Bingbot

What is Bingbot?

Bingbot is Bing's primary bot, used to crawl websites for indexing in the Bing search engine.

Bingbot is used to gather information about websites for the Bing search index, including the content of the pages, the links on the pages, and the structure of the website.

By continuously crawling the web, Bingbot helps to ensure that the information in the Bing search index is up to date and relevant to users.

In Bing Webmaster Tools it is possible to test pages using Bingbot for crawl errors, get data about Bingbot's performance on a website, as well as control the speed and timing of Bingbot crawls.

Example user agent string

The following is an example of a Bingbot user agent string:

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)Code language: HTTP (http)

New Bingbot User-Agent String (April 2022)

In April 2022 Bing announced in a blogpost 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)

By regularly updating our web page rendering engine to the most recent stable version of Microsoft Edge we will be making the above user agent strings evergreen. In the strings above, "W.X.Y.Z" would be substituted with the latest Microsoft Edge version we're using, such as “100.0.4896.127". 

How to block Bingbot from crawling

If you want to stop the Bingbot bot from crawling your site, you can set up a disallow rule in your robots.txt file as per the following example:

User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /Code language: HTTP (http)

References

Citation URL

https://www.searchcandy.uk/seo/seo-glossary/bingbot/

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What is this content? This article is part of an SEO glossary and reference guide created by Search Candy - an SEO consultancy based in the UK. The Search Candy team is committed to providing content that adheres to the highest editorial standards. The date this article was created and last checked for accuracy is posted above. To reuse this content please get in touch via our contact form.
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