What Is Bingbot?
Bingbot is the web crawler operated by Microsoft to discover, crawl, and index content for Bing search results.
How It Works
Like other search crawlers, Bingbot follows links across the web, downloads page content, and processes it for potential inclusion in Bing’s search index — governed by the same general rules around robots.txt directives, meta robots tags, and sitemaps that apply to crawlers generally.
How It Differs from Googlebot
While both crawlers serve a similar fundamental purpose, they operate independently with their own crawl scheduling, rendering behavior, and indexing criteria — a site fully accessible to Googlebot isn’t automatically guaranteed identical treatment from Bingbot, which is part of why verifying and monitoring a site through Bing Webmaster Tools separately from Google Search Console remains worthwhile for sites that care about Bing visibility.
WRITTEN BY
Annabelle Cochrane
MANAGING DIRECTOR & SEO SPECIALIST
Annabelle holds a Bachelor of Business (Marketing) from QUT and works directly with every ALC Consulting client. She’s based on the Sunshine Coast and works with businesses across Australia.
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