MS
MSNBot
GoodBotVerifiedBOTLegacy Microsoft crawler formerly used by MSN Search. Replaced by Bingbot but still occasionally active. Operated by Microsoft.
Identification
Bot name
MSNBot
Operator
Microsoft
Category
Search Engine Crawler
Kind
BOT
Verification
Verified bot
User-agent patterns
msnbotUser-agent strings
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Rated Sep 23, 2026 from public evidence
How we rated this bot
Identifies itself honestly, and we found no credible reports of abuse.
Names itself honestly
Yes
Verified by Cloudflare
No
Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs
Not stated
Ignores site rules
None found
Disguises itself or evades blocks
None found
Overloads sites
None found
How widely people complain
One or two isolated anecdotes from individual site owners
Reddit discussion
Discussion is mixed, with some site owners unhappy about it
What we read
Block or allow MSNBot
Block it
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 MSNBot from crawling your entire site User-agent: msnbot Disallow: / # Allow MSNBot full access User-agent: msnbot Allow: /
Allow & verify
Ensure your robots.txt allows msnbot. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.
Traffic & trends
Cloudflare Radar traffic
No Cloudflare traffic data available.
Google Trends interest
Loading trend data…
From the community
Recent Reddit discussion mentioning this bot.
r/
Known bots to block
r/
msnbot is using MY robots.txt to crawl YOUR site
r/
Some (probably MS) spyware tool is reporting user browsing history to MS, and their bots are crawling those URLs. Anyone heard of it or can tell me more?
r/
windows 10 explorer.exe
r/
MSNBot searching our e-commerce website for random strings, is it an attack or misconfiguration?
Related bots
Other crawlers operated by Microsoft.
Links & references
Data sources
This profile is compiled from the following sources.
BingOfficial
Last updated November 1, 2026
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