How Bingbot works
Bingbot is Microsoft’s search crawler. It discovers URLs from links, sitemaps and submissions, requests the pages, renders them and adds what it finds to the Bing index. It reads robots.txt like any well-behaved crawler, identifies itself with the Bingbot token, and Microsoft publishes a method for verifying that a request claiming to be Bingbot genuinely is.
Two features are worth knowing about. Bing Webmaster Tools shows what the crawler found, which URLs are indexed and where errors occurred, and it lets you adjust how quickly the crawler works through your site. Bing also supports IndexNow, a submission protocol that lets you tell participating engines a URL has changed instead of waiting to be crawled again.
Why Bingbot matters
Because the Bing index no longer feeds only Bing. Microsoft’s assistant products are grounded in the same index, so a page Bingbot has never fetched cannot be retrieved or cited by them. For a business that quietly wrote Bing off years ago on the grounds that the traffic was small, that is a new reason to look again.
There is a market angle as well. Bing’s share is uneven by country and by device, and it tends to be strongest on desktop and inside workplaces where a Microsoft browser is the default. If you sell to businesses — particularly in the UK, the USA or Australia — its share of your audience is usually larger than its share of the internet.
Common mistakes with Bingbot
The first is assuming whatever you did for Google covers Bing. Most of it does: one clean, crawlable, well-linked site serves both. What does not carry over is the reporting. Nobody notices a Bing-specific crawl error until they open Bing Webmaster Tools, and plenty of sites have never opened it at all.
The second is a robots file written for Googlebot alone. A rule sitting inside a Googlebot group does not apply to Bingbot, and a Bingbot group that omits a rule you assumed was universal will let it crawl exactly what you meant to keep back.
The third is throttling out of caution. Crawl controls exist for genuine capacity problems; using them because a bot looks busy in the logs only slows down how quickly your changes are seen.
What to do about it
Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. It costs very little time, and it is the only place you will see how Microsoft’s crawler actually treats your site rather than inferring it from Google’s reports.
Then keep the fundamentals shared. One XML sitemap listing your real canonical URLs, clean internal links, pages that load quickly, and a robots file whose rules are written out for each crawler you care about will serve both engines without duplicated effort. If publishing speed matters to you — a shop with changing stock, a site that publishes news — enabling IndexNow is a small job with an immediate effect on how fast updates are picked up.