AI crawlers · Microsoft
Is your site blocking bingbot?
bingbot is the crawler behind Bing and Copilot answers. Check your site now: we read your robots.txt exactly as bingbot must, ask your server as each AI crawler, and look at your product pages.
Does blocking it hurt?
AI search and answers Blocking bingbot keeps your shop out of Bing and Copilot answers: your pages can't be read there, so they can't be shown or recommended.
In our research, <1% of 2,159 online shops block bingbot in robots.txt. See the research.
Allow or block it in robots.txt
Microsoft says bingbot follows robots.txt, so the lines below decide whether it reads your shop.
To let it in (add to your robots.txt, at yourshop.com/robots.txt):
User-agent: bingbot Allow: /
To keep it out:
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /
A more specific group wins: if your robots.txt also has a group for bingbot, that group decides, not the “User-agent: *” rules. Our check reads it the same way (RFC 9309).
Other places it gets blocked
- Cloudflare. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new sites since July 2025, and it can also write your robots.txt for you. If your site uses Cloudflare, check its AI crawler settings first (MIT Technology Review).
- Security plugins and firewalls. WordPress security plugins and host firewalls sometimes refuse crawlers they don’t recognise, even when robots.txt allows them. Our check asks your server as each crawler and shows any refusal.
Where this comes from
Microsoft’s own documentation: www.bing.com. Bing's crawler page lists bingbot as its main crawler; Copilot answers use the Bing index.
We check 18 AI crawlers in one go. See them all · How the check works