Bot from Microsoft

MicrosoftPreview

In short

MicrosoftPreview is Microsoft's bot, filed under Other. The token to write in robots.txt is MicrosoftPreview. Verify it by reverse DNS, then a forward lookup. 4.0 percent of 5,938 top-10,000 sites with a parsed robots.txt disallow it at the root (crawl of 2026-11-04). MicrosoftPreview is covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance for its crawlers.

Operator

Microsoft Vendor profile: Microsoft

Purpose

Other All other rows. Link previews, ad checks, dataset crawls, SEO tools and legacy tokens that fit none of the five purposes.

User-agent string

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

robots.txt token

MicrosoftPreview Matched case-insensitively (RFC 9309). The token and the user-agent string are different things.

Respects robots.txt

Yes, per operator

Covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance for its crawlers. Source, read 2026-11-04.

Verification

Reverse DNS

Reverse-resolve the source address, then forward-resolve the name and require the same address. Documentation, read 2026-11-04.

IP ranges

Not published.

Rate behaviour

Not published.

Block rate

4.0% of 5,938 top-10,000 sites with a parsed robots.txt disallow MicrosoftPreview at the root (235 sites). 0.0% name it; 3.9% refuse it only through a * group. Rank 29 of 31 tokens measured.

Across all 8,624 parsed robots.txt files in the crawl: 2.9% (0.0% named). Crawl of 2026-11-04; report.

Documentation

bing.com, read 2026-11-04.

Note. Generates page snapshots for Microsoft products; desktop and mobile variants.

Allow and refuse lines

User-agent: MicrosoftPreview
Allow: /

User-agent: MicrosoftPreview
Disallow: /

Refusing or allowing in robots.txt states a preference. Enforcement of a refusal belongs in your WAF; see how to verify the identity above.

Microsoft in the Verification Ledger

bingbot.json (creationTime 2024-01-03) and a verification tool; nothing for Browse with Copilot. All operators.

IP lists

• www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

Reverse DNS

Verify Bingbot tool and documented methods

Key directory

not published

Cloudflare

not checked

Visa TAP registry

no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)

Mastercard Agent Pay

no public operator-level registration found (checked 2026-11-04)

Other Microsoft rows

• Bingbot Search index token bingbot
• Browse with Copilot (formerly Copilot Actions) Task agent no token

Last reviewed 2026-11-04