Meet our crawlers

Bing operates four crawlers today:

  • Bingbot
  • Adidxbot
  • MSNBot
  • BingPreview

Bingbot is our standard crawler and handles most of our crawling needs each day. Adidxbot is our Bing Ads crawler and is responsible for crawling ads and following through to websites from those ads for quality control. Msnbot was the original name of our crawler before Bingbot arrived on the scene. Msnbot still handles some crawling duties, but will retire soon. Finally, BingPreview is used to generate page snapshots. You can find more details about Bing Previewhere.

As a general rule, Bing does not share the IP addresses from which we crawl the web, but you can always use the Verify Bingbot tool to check whether a crawler actually belongs to Bing.

To control how our crawlers interact with your website, you have two options:

  • Robots.txt files can be configured to tell our crawlers how to interact with your website
  • Through Bing Webmaster tools you can control crawl rates by the hour using the Crawl Control tool.

Should you notice crawl issues with Bingbot or any of our other crawlers, please follow the steps outlined in How to Report and Issue With Bingbot.

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