How to block bingbot
Operated by Microsoft. bingbot is Microsoft's standard web crawler that handles most of Bing's crawling needs each day, indexing web content for Bing search results using both desktop and mobile variants.
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: bingbot Disallow: /
nginx
In the server block, then reload.
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(bingbot)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "bingbot" bad_bot
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>
Cloudflare
Security → WAF → Custom rules.
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block (http.user_agent contains "bingbot")
WordPress
A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';
foreach (['bingbot'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: bingbot');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
bingbot publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.