What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is a web crawler used by Microsoft to gather information and build a searchable index of the web. Bingbot powers the Bing search engine, just as Googlebot is to Google and YandexBot is to Yandex.
Bingbot uses the below user agent strings:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
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)
Bingbot uses the most stable version of Microsoft Edge as its web page rendering engine. So, in the actual user string that crawls a site, W.X.Y.Z will be replaced with the version number of the latest Edge browser used by Bingbot.
Aside from Bingbot, Bing has other crawler bots, including:
- AdIdxBot — Used by Bing Ads.
- BingPreview — Used to crawl images.
- MicrosoftPreview — Used to generate screenshots for Microsoft products.