MSN
GoodBotVerifiedBOTMSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine. Operated by Microsoft.
What is MSN?
MSN is a web crawler operated by Microsoft. MSNBot was the web crawler for Microsoft's MSN Search, which has since been replaced by Bing. Its purpose was to index web pages for inclusion in the MSN search engine. As a search engine crawler, it systematically indexes web pages to build and maintain search engine results.
Identification
msnbot/Why it crawls your site
MSN crawls websites to index web pages and build search engine results. It is operated by Microsoft as part of their search engine infrastructure. If you see this bot in your server logs, it is a verified crawler and generally safe.
Block or allow MSN
Add a Disallow rule for msnbot/ in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.
# Block MSN from crawling your entire site User-agent: msnbot/ Disallow: / # Allow MSN full access User-agent: msnbot/ Allow: /
Ensure your robots.txt allows msnbot/. Verify requests are genuine by checking the user-agent string and referring to Microsoft's documentation.
Traffic & trends
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From the community
Recent Reddit discussion mentioning this bot.
Related bots
Other crawlers operated by Microsoft.
Links & references
Data sources
This profile is compiled from the following sources.