Verified Bots Directory

Directory / Search engines

BingPreview

Verifiable

Microsoft fetcher used to generate page snapshots for previews in Bing search results. Runs both desktop and mobile variants.

Operated by Microsoft · Official documentation

User agents

Patterns this directory matches, with real observed strings.

  • regexBingPreview/\d
  • observedMozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b
  • observedMozilla/5.0 (Windows Phone 8.1; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 530) like Gecko BingPreview/1.0b

How to verify

Reverse-DNS check a client IP

dig -x <client-ip> +short   # expect a hostname matching *.search.msn.com

Reverse-DNS suffixes: *.search.msn.com

Good Bot Practices scorecard

  • Identifies honestly

    Stable UA token documented (1 pattern)

  • Verifiable

    Verifiable

  • Respects robots.txt

    Honors robots.txt

  • Behaves

    Crawl-rate behavior is operator-declared; not machine-verifiable from this dataset

  • Reachable operator

    Operator and documentation published

Measured against the Good Bot Practices.