What is Bing Preview?
Bing Preview is a fetcher operated by Microsoft. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Microsoft |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Bing Preview usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
How To Block Bing Preview With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that Bing Preview not access your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to request the same of all fetchers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Bing Preview # https://knownagents.com/agents/bing-preview
Disallow: /Global Statistics for Bing Preview
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
0% of top websites block Bing Preview in their robots.txt files.
Overall Fetcher Traffic
2.6% of all web traffic came from fetchers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Bing Preview?
Usually not. Blocking Bing Preview may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. Almost none of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Bing Preview.
Does Bing Preview Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. Bing Preview is not expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Does Bing Preview Access Private Content?
No. Bing Preview has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
Why Is Bing Preview Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. Bing Preview fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.
How Can I Tell if Bing Preview Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Bing Preview visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Bing Preview". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because Bing Preview does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.