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Microsoft

msnbot

IndexingNo fetched rangesVerified July 2026

What it is

Microsoft's legacy search crawler, still seen alongside Bingbot. Classified as indexing because it feeds a searchable retrieval index.

In Aiola's taxonomy, Indexing means crawled for ai or search indexing.

User agent

Look for the match token inside the complete HTTP User-Agent header. Tokens can be spoofed, so use the network checks below for authentication.

Full example User-Agent
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
Case-insensitive match token
msnbot

Official IP ranges

Microsoft has not published official IP ranges that Aiola successfully fetched for msnbot. Aiola does not list cloud-provider ranges or community guesses as if they authenticated this crawler.

Verify authenticity

Start with the source IP recorded by your trusted edge or server, not an untrusted forwarded header.

Reverse- and forward-DNS double lookup
host REQUEST_IP
# Confirm the hostname ends in an official suffix
host RETURNED_HOSTNAME
# The forward lookup must return REQUEST_IP

For production checks, test against every current prefix in the vendor feed. Re-fetch feeds regularly: a July 2026 snapshot is evidence of publication, not a permanent firewall list.

Control it with robots.txt

Microsoft documents crawler controls for this bot family. Robots.txt can direct cooperative crawling, but it cannot prove that a request is authentic.

Allow msnbot
User-agent: msnbot
Allow: /
Block msnbot
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Read Microsoft's official crawler documentation ↗

Track it

Aiola tracks this crawler on your site — crawls, pages, trends. See when msnbot arrives, which URLs it requests, and how activity changes over time.

Explore Aiola Analytics

FAQ

What is msnbot?

Microsoft's legacy search crawler, still seen alongside Bingbot. Classified as indexing because it feeds a searchable retrieval index.

What user-agent token identifies msnbot?

Match the case-insensitive token “msnbot” in the User-Agent header. A matching header alone does not authenticate the sender.

Can I verify msnbot by IP address?

No official msnbot CIDR snapshot was successfully fetched for this verification date. Do not treat an arbitrary cloud IP as proof of identity.

Can robots.txt block msnbot?

Microsoft documents crawler controls for this bot family. Robots.txt can direct cooperative crawling, but it cannot prove that a request is authentic. Use the specific “msnbot” group when you want a rule for this identity without changing rules for every crawler.

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