Bingbot is a web crawler used by Microsoft to gather information to build a searchable index of the web. It powers the Bing search engine.
It does the same work as Googlebot does for Google.
Bingbot was launched in October 2010.
According to Cloudflare Radar, Bingbot is the 3rd most active crawler in the world (AhrefsBot is ranked as 4th)
The User Agent strings for Bingbot are:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Like any other good search bot, Bingbot respects the rules in the robots.txt file as well as “nofollow” directives on links and pages.
Apart from Bingbot, Bing also operates AdIdxBot (for Bing Ads) and BingPreview (to generate page snapshots).