What is Bingbot?
Bingbot is the web crawler that builds Microsoft's Bing index, the index Microsoft Copilot searches when it grounds an answer in web results. Bingbot matters more than Bing's search share suggests, because Microsoft Copilot grounds its web answers in the Bing search service. A page Bingbot cannot crawl is a page Copilot's web search cannot find.
How does Microsoft Copilot use Bing?
Microsoft documents that when web search is on, Copilot parses the prompt, generates a search query of a few words, and sends it to the Bing search service; the results are used to compose the response (Microsoft Learn, updated August 18, 2026).
The generated query is not the user's whole prompt, and in Copilot Chat the exact queries appear in the answer's citation section. Bing's index is the pool those searches draw from, which is what Bingbot builds.
How do you verify a request really is Bingbot?
With DNS, not the user-agent string alone. Bing's guidance is to run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address from your logs, check it resolves to a name ending in search.msn.com, then run a forward lookup to confirm that name resolves back to the same IP (Bing Webmaster Blog, August 31, 2012).
Can you limit how Copilot uses your pages?
Bing introduced robots meta values for this. In September 2023 it said content tagged NOCACHE may be included in Bing Chat answers with only the URL, title and snippet shown, and content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers or linked from them; both stay in search results (Bing Webmaster Blog, September 22, 2023).
Bing Chat is now Copilot, and the guidance has been revised since, so check Bing's current Webmaster Guidelines before relying on the 2023 wording.
Why measure Copilot separately, in a real example?
Because engines disagree on the same questions. The public Tesla example (Oct 4, 2026) did not include Copilot, but across the four engines it did ask, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews named Tesla in 16 of 25 buyer answers each and Perplexity in 10.
Copilot searches a different index from all four, so none of those figures predicts it. If your buyers use Microsoft 365, measure Copilot on its own.
Does Proofsource track Copilot?
Yes, on Managed or a Custom plan, switched on with the team after a call, alongside Google AI Mode and Gemini. Self-serve plans track ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. See engines and models and Crawler access.
Common questions about Bingbot
Should I allow Bingbot?
Yes, if you want to appear in Bing and in Copilot's web answers. Blocking it removes your pages from the index Copilot searches.
Does Bingbot respect robots.txt?
Bing honors robots.txt rules for Bingbot. Use robots meta values such as NOARCHIVE for finer control over AI answers, per Bing's current guidelines.
Is Copilot the same as Bing search?
No. Copilot writes an answer and uses Bing search results to ground it. Bing search returns ranked results.
Do other AI tools use Bing's index?
Some products license Bing results, but vendors rarely document it. Measure each engine your buyers use rather than inferring from its index.
Related terms
- robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, under the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309).
- Grounding
Grounding is tying an AI model's answer to outside sources, such as live search results, so its claims rest on retrieved content rather than on memory alone.
- Answer engine
An answer engine is a search tool that replies to a question with one written answer, usually with sources, instead of a ranked list of links.
- OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler for surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features, and sites that opt out of it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.
Worked example: Tesla, public AI answers, Oct 4, 2026: Proofsource's first scan of Tesla, 25 buyer questions and 5 brand questions, one answer per question on each of four engines. A small sample from one brand, shown as an example, not a benchmark.
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