Microsoft
adidxbot
Checks landing pages for Microsoft advertising.
Ad reviewPurposeWeb search
HTTP identifierbingbot
IdentityVerify beyond the name
THE SIGNAL
What this visit tells you
A Bing crawl precedes any possible search exposure; it does not prove a Copilot citation.
URL coverage
Crawl errors
Repeat crawls
Your next move
Compare crawl errors with Bing Webmaster Tools and repair important public URLs.
The technical details
MarkdownHow to identify it
Look for the bingbot identifier in a request’s User-Agent. This is a name match, not identity verification. Version strings may change.
How to check identity
Use Microsoft’s documented bot verification procedure and current IP information; do not trust the User-Agent alone.
Access and robots.txt
Use the bingbot robots.txt group for Bing crawling. Test changed rules in Bing Webmaster Tools before relying on them.
Optional full-site opt-out. Merge with existing rules only if intended. robots.txt does not secure private content.
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /Seeing 403 or 404 responses?
403 means access was denied; 404 means the resource was not found. Compare the public path, request time, edge security event and origin response to find the cause.
Separate intended restrictions and secret-file probes from pages that should work. A User-Agent name alone does not justify allowing a request.
SourcesReviewed 2026-09-14
Identity and purpose are based on these sources. Analytics interpretation and suggested checks are Apostl guidance.
APOSTL PulseSee bingbot in context
See their requests. Find the pages that matter.
See your agent trafficKEEP EXPLORING
Different bots, different intent
Microsoft
MicrosoftPreview
Generates page previews for Microsoft products.
Link previews
Googlebot
Crawls pages for Google Search using desktop and smartphone variants.
Web search