How is Bingbot different from Googlebot?

Bingbot and Googlebot both crawl and index web pages, but they serve different search ecosystems. Bingbot feeds Bing Search and Microsoft Copilot AI answers, while Googlebot feeds Google Search and Google AI Overviews. Bingbot tends to crawl at a lower volume than Googlebot and relies more heavily on signals submitted through Bing Webmaster Tools, including IndexNow for real-time URL submission.

Does Bingbot affect AI search visibility?

Yes. Bingbot is the primary data source for Microsoft Copilot, which generates AI-powered answers from Bing's index. If Bingbot cannot crawl and index your content, it will not appear in Copilot responses. Optimizing for Bingbot is now a direct path to AI search visibility across Microsoft's ecosystem.

How do you check if Bingbot is crawling your site?

Use Bing Webmaster Tools to view crawl activity, crawl errors, and indexed pages. You can also check your server access logs for requests from Bingbot's user-agent strings. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a Crawl Control feature that lets you set preferred crawl rates by time of day.

What Is Bingbot?

Bingbot is Microsoft's automated web crawler that discovers, fetches, and indexes web pages for inclusion in Bing Search results and, increasingly, for powering AI-generated answers in Microsoft Copilot. While Bing holds roughly 10% of global search market share, its importance has grown significantly because Bingbot now feeds data to Microsoft Copilot, which has surpassed 100 million active users. For websites focused on technical SEO and AI search visibility, understanding how Bingbot works is no longer optional.

How Does Bingbot Work?

Bingbot follows a crawl-index-serve process similar to Googlebot, but with some important differences in how it discovers and prioritizes URLs.

URL discovery. Bingbot discovers new pages by following links on already-indexed pages, reading XML sitemaps submitted through Bing Webmaster Tools, and processing URLs submitted via the IndexNow protocol. Unlike Googlebot, Bingbot places significant weight on IndexNow, a real-time URL submission protocol that Microsoft co-developed with Yandex. When you publish or update a page, IndexNow notifies Bingbot immediately rather than waiting for the next crawl cycle.

Crawl scheduling. Bingbot determines crawl frequency based on site authority, content freshness, and server responsiveness. Sites that publish frequently and respond quickly to requests get crawled more often. Bing Webmaster Tools includes a Crawl Control feature that lets site owners set preferred crawl rates by time of day - a feature Google Search Console does not offer.

Rendering. Bingbot uses a modern rendering engine capable of executing JavaScript. However, as with Googlebot, JavaScript-heavy pages may take longer to process. Server-side rendering or static generation remains the safest approach for ensuring Bingbot can fully process your content on the first pass.

What Are Bingbot's User-Agent Strings?

Bingbot identifies itself through specific user-agent strings in HTTP request headers. The primary user agents are:

Bingbot (desktop): Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Bingbot (mobile): Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36

You can verify that a request is genuinely from Bingbot by performing a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP address. Legitimate Bingbot IPs resolve to hostnames ending in search.msn.com. This verification is important because spammers sometimes spoof Bingbot's user-agent string to bypass robots.txt restrictions.

Why Does Bingbot Matter for AI Search?

Bingbot's role has expanded beyond traditional search indexing. Microsoft Copilot - integrated into Bing, Edge, Windows, and Microsoft 365 - generates AI answers by drawing from Bing's search index. This means Bingbot is now the gateway to AI search visibility across Microsoft's entire ecosystem.

When a user asks Copilot a question, the system queries Bing's index to find relevant, authoritative content, then uses large language models to synthesize an answer. If your content is not in Bing's index because Bingbot could not crawl it, your pages cannot be referenced in Copilot's AI-generated responses.

This makes Bingbot optimization a practical component of any AI search optimization strategy. While much of the SEO industry focuses exclusively on Google, the rise of AI-powered search through Copilot, ChatGPT (which also uses Bing's index via its browse feature), and similar tools means that Bing indexing has direct downstream effects on AI visibility.

How Do You Optimize for Bingbot?

Several practices improve how Bingbot crawls and indexes your site:

Implement IndexNow. This is the single most impactful step for Bing-specific optimization. IndexNow lets you push URLs to Bingbot the moment content is published or updated. Many CMS platforms, including WordPress and Cloudflare, have IndexNow plugins or built-in support.

Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. This gives you access to crawl reports, index coverage data, and diagnostic tools specific to Bing. You can also submit your XML sitemap directly, which helps Bingbot discover pages that may not be reachable through link crawling alone.

Optimize meta tags and structured data. Bingbot places strong emphasis on clear, descriptive title tags, meta descriptions, and schema markup. Structured data helps Bingbot understand your content's context and can improve how your pages appear in both traditional Bing results and Copilot AI answers.

Manage crawl budget efficiently. Because Bingbot typically crawls at lower volume than Googlebot, wasted crawl budget has a proportionally larger impact. Block low-value pages through robots.txt, fix redirect chains, and resolve crawl errors to ensure Bingbot spends its limited crawl capacity on your most important content.

Ensure fast server response times. Bingbot is sensitive to server performance. Slow responses cause Bingbot to reduce its crawl rate, which means fewer pages get indexed. A CDN and proper caching configuration help maintain fast response times during crawl spikes.

Should You Treat Bing Differently From Google?

For most sites, the majority of SEO best practices apply equally to both Googlebot and Bingbot. Clean HTML structure, fast load times, mobile-friendly design, and quality content help with both search engines. However, a few Bing-specific considerations are worth noting.

Bing places relatively more weight on social signals and exact-match keywords in titles and headings compared to Google. Bing also indexes and credits backlinks somewhat differently, with a stronger preference for .edu and .gov domains as authority signals.

The biggest practical difference is IndexNow. If you are not using it, you are leaving Bing indexing speed on the table. For sites that publish frequently, IndexNow can reduce the time between publication and Bing indexing from days to minutes - which also means faster availability for Copilot AI answers.

Given that Bingbot now serves as the data pipeline for both traditional search and AI-generated answers across Microsoft's product ecosystem, treating Bing as an afterthought means missing a growing segment of search visibility.