Bingbot
Bingbot is Microsoft's main web crawler, the bot that visits pages so they can show up in Bing search. Microsoft's crawler page says it handles most of Bing's crawling each day, and that Bing runs other bots too, like AdIdxBot for ads and BingPreview for page snapshots. Site owners control it through robots.txt.
Source: Bing Webmaster Tools, Which crawlers does Bing use?, checked October 29, 2026
What Bingbot means for your business
The tags Bing reads now reach past its results page. Microsoft's list of the robots meta tags Bing supports says a noarchive tag means a page isn't linked in Chat and Copilot and isn't used to train Microsoft's AI. A nocache tag lets Copilot show only the page's link, title and snippet. When Microsoft added these controls in 2023, it said pages with either tag still appear in Bing search results.
A noarchive tag added years ago to hide cached copies of a page now also keeps Copilot from linking to it. We'd check your pages for it before guessing why Copilot never names you.
Microsoft also says user agent strings are easy to spoof, so a visit that calls itself Bingbot may not be. Its Verify Bingbot tool checks an address for you, and Bing Webmaster Tools lets you set how fast Bingbot crawls, hour by hour. If Bing sends you almost nothing and Copilot never mentions you, a check of what Bing and the AI tools can read on your site is one of the first things we'd run.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia, SEO glossaries, bot directories and Bing's crawler page, and said Bing's index feeds other search engines, which Microsoft's page doesn't say. ChatGPT cited Bing's help pages. Neither mentioned the Copilot controls.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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