Microsoft Bing’s web crawler for discovering and retrieving web content for Bing search.
Bingbot is Microsoft Bing’s web crawler. It requests web content as part of the process used to discover and maintain information for Bing search. Treat its activity as evidence about Bing’s access to your site, rather than assume that success with another search engine proves the same access is working here.
Bing Webmaster Tools provides information about crawling, indexing and search performance. Its sitemap reporting can help you check whether Bing can read the URL inventory you submit. An account, a sitemap submission or a crawler visit should not be presented as a promise that a page will appear for a particular search or be cited in an AI answer.
If a log entry says “bingbot,” verify the identity before changing access controls. Microsoft documents checking the requesting IP through reverse and forward DNS. This distinction matters when diagnosing suspicious traffic: a self-reported crawler name is a clue, not proof that the request is genuinely from Microsoft.
Takeaway: Include Bing in your technical checks when it is a relevant discovery channel for the business. Review its own reports rather than infer Bing visibility from Google data or from an AI-visibility promise.
Example
A wholesaler finds that a recently added product category is represented in one search engine but has little evidence of discovery in Bing. The team checks Bing’s sitemap status and page access separately. It does not conclude that the category needs a rewrite merely because the two services are reporting different states.
What to check
Record the affected URL, the report or log evidence and the time of the check. Ask whether the problem is access, discovery, indexing or performance before changing a sitewide rule. Do not whitelist traffic based solely on the text of a user-agent header.
For more detail, see Start using Bing Webmaster Tools to improve your site visibility.