Bingbot is Microsoft's search crawler. Bing, Copilot, and other Microsoft AI surfaces that quote the web still depend on that index. Hardal groups it with Googlebot as a search crawler for AI-assisted results in why we built isvisible.ai.
Blocking GPTBot does nothing to what Bing sees, and Bingbot is not a Microsoft Ads pixel. Microsoft Advertising conversion tracking is a separate, human-ads problem (UTM, click IDs, server-side events), same as Google Ads.
How to measure it
- Bing Webmaster Tools for crawl and index
- Origin logs matching
bingbot/Bingbot - Hardal AI Visibility so Bingbot sits under Microsoft instead of an anonymous bot slice
GA4 will not count the crawl. Referral sessions from Bing or Copilot are human (or at least browser) traffic, so keep those in acquisition reports and Bingbot in the crawler report.
What to report
- Coverage on the same money pages you watch for Googlebot
- Crawl errors that would also starve Copilot citations
- Googlebot vs Bingbot vs OAI-SearchBot, since each runs its own index and reads your robots.txt on its own terms
robots.txt
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
unless you are deliberately leaving Bing. Do not put Bingbot in a GPTBot Disallow block.
How Hardal measures it
Hardal names Bingbot as a search-engine agent under Microsoft, on the same first-party pipeline and with no extra script. For paid ChatGPT, use the ChatGPT Ads hub instead of this page.