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Is my site blocked from Microsoft Copilot?
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Microsoft Copilot answers from the web through the Bing search service: Microsoft documents that Copilot sends a short generated search query to Bing and composes its answer from what Bing returns. Bing's crawler is bingbot, and Bing says it respects the preferences site owners express through robots.txt. We found no Microsoft documentation of a separate crawler for Copilot. Copilot's citations of a site are reported in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report.
Sources: Microsoft Learn, Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot, read ; Bing Webmaster Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, read .
Eight requests: robots.txt, the homepage as a browser, and the homepage as six AI crawlers. Nothing is stored.
The crawlers that decide it for Microsoft Copilot
- bingbotMicrosoft
- Bing's crawler. Copilot's web answers come from Bing's results, and Bing respects robots.txt. (Bing Webmaster Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, read )In this check: robots.txt verdict only. CDNs such as Cloudflare verify bingbot by its IP address, so a request that imitates it from our address is refused by design and would prove nothing.
Other ways a site is invisible to Microsoft Copilot
Crawler access is the first condition of AI visibility, not the only one. This check does not measure the following.
- Not in Bing's index. Copilot grounds on Bing, so a page that is not in Bing's index is largely invisible to it, however Google ranks it. (Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report and our research paper)
The free audit crawls up to 25 pages the way an answer engine reads them and reports pages whose content only appears with JavaScript, pages marked noindex and blocked crawlers, with the evidence. Whether a page is in a search index is reported by the index's owner, in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools; neither this check nor the audit sees it.