Bingbot
Bingbot is Microsoft's web crawler that builds the Bing search index, which also powers Microsoft Copilot, so blocking it removes you from both Bing and Copilot answers.
Bingbot is the crawler behind Bing — and therefore behind Copilot. It indexes
the web for Microsoft's search engine, and because Microsoft Copilot
answers from the Bing index, Bingbot is the gateway to citation in both. It
identifies itself with the bingbot user-agent and obeys
robots.txt.
Allowing Bingbot is squarely an access move: block it and you disappear from Bing results and Copilot answers simultaneously. Bing also reportedly shares index signals with some other AI engines, so Bing crawlability can have reach beyond Microsoft's own surfaces. It's a frequently overlooked check for teams focused only on Google.
Example. A site that inadvertently disallows bingbot in robots.txt loses Bing rankings and vanishes from Copilot citations at once — a single misconfigured line with outsized cost.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain that tells crawlers which user-agents may access which parts of your site, and is how you allow or block AI crawlers.
- Microsoft CopilotMicrosoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant that answers questions using the Bing search index and cites web sources, making Bing crawlability a prerequisite for Copilot visibility.
- OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT's search feature, making it the user-agent to allow if you want to be cited in ChatGPT's answers.