Bingbot

Bingbot is the official web crawler (or spider) used by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Its job is to browse the internet automatically, discovering new and updated pages so they can be indexed and shown in Bing search results.

Much like Googlebot (Google’s crawler), Bingbot continuously visits websites, follows links, and analyzes content to help Bing understand what’s on the web.

How Bingbot works

When Bingbot visits your website, it sends an HTTP request — just like a browser would — and downloads the page's HTML, scripts, and sometimes images. Then it analyzes the content and stores it in Bing’s search index.

Here’s a basic overview of its process:

1. Discover new pages through sitemaps, backlinks, or internal links.
2. Crawl the page by loading the content.
3. Analyze and index the content to determine what keywords and topics it’s relevant for.
4. Rank the page in search results based on relevance, quality, speed, and other ranking factors.

Why Bingbot matters for SEO

If you want your website to appear in Bing’s search results, Bingbot needs to be able to access, crawl, and understand your site. That’s why it’s important to:

• Allow Bingbot to crawl your content in your robots.txt file.
• Submit a sitemap via Bing Webmaster Tools to guide the crawler.
• Ensure your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly, so Bingbot can properly index it.
• Fix broken links or redirects that might block or confuse the crawler.

Bingbot also respects key SEO settings such as:

• Meta robots tags (e.g., noindex, nofollow)
• Canonical tags
• Redirects (301/302)

Controlling Bingbot

You can manage how Bingbot interacts with your site by:

• Editing your robots.txt file to allow or block certain pages.
• Using the URL blocking tool in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Monitoring crawl stats in your Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard.

In summary, Bingbot is Bing’s web crawler, responsible for discovering and indexing your content so it appears in Bing search results. Ensuring Bingbot can easily access and understand your website is key to growing your visibility on Bing.