Bingbot
In one line
Bingbot is Microsoft's crawler for Bing and Copilot search indexing — and because Copilot's AI answers ride on the Bing index, it has become a GEO-relevant bot again.
Going deeper
Bingbot is Microsoft's general-purpose search crawler. It has spent years sitting behind Googlebot in priority, but it climbed back up the GEO ladder once the Bing index started feeding Microsoft Copilot's answers.
The point for marketers is straightforward: pages Bingbot has not indexed are effectively out of Copilot's citation pool. The reflex 'Bing traffic is small, so I don't bother' costs you a free citation surface in the AI search era.
Microsoft has not published a Google-Extended-style training-vs-search split for Bingbot. In practice, allowing Bing for search makes you eligible for Copilot answers in the same motion, so the policy decision is simpler than for the OpenAI or Google fleets, which split training and citation deliberately.
Related terms
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant integrated across Bing, Edge and Office — and one of the AI search surfaces with the strongest enterprise reach.
GEO·AEOOAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's separate crawler for ChatGPT Search indexing — distinct from GPTBot, so you can control training and search-indexing access independently.
GEO·AEOGoogle-Extended
Google-Extended is the separate user agent Google uses for training Gemini and Vertex AI, letting site owners control AI training access independently from regular search indexing.
GEO·AEOAI Crawler
AI Crawler is the umbrella term for web crawlers operated for AI model training or AI-search answer generation — GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are the canonical examples.
GEO·AEOGEO
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content and data so that a brand gets cited and recommended inside generative AI search answers like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
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