🤖 Overview

bintellibot is a web crawler operated by Microsoft, first documented in Bing’s official crawler list in early 2023. Its purpose is to collect publicly accessible web content for training and improving Bing’s AI‑powered search features, including the Bing Chat (Copilot) system and knowledge graph updates. Microsoft defines it as a sister bot to Bingbot, optimized for intelligent content understanding.

🌐 Technical Behavior

bintellibot crawls using HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 with TLS 1.2/1.3 support, sending requests from Azure IP ranges such as 13.66.0.0/16 and 40.112.0.0/12. It typically issues 10–20 requests per minute per IP, but can burst higher during initial indexing. The bot respects Crawl-Delay directives and uses a rotating IP pool to distribute load. User‑agent strings include Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingintelligentbot/1.0; +https://www.bing.com/bingintelligentbot.htm) and BingIntelligentBot/2.0. It also sends an Accept‑Encoding header for gzip and an Accept‑Language header set to en‑US,en;q=0.5. Reverse DNS on its IPs resolves to *.search.msn.com domains.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Microsoft’s webmaster guidelines, bintellibot fully honors Disallow, Allow, and Crawl‑Delay directives in robots.txt, as well as meta robots tags and X‑Robots‑Tag headers. Webmasters can block it by adding User‑agent: bingintelligentbot. Microsoft recommends allowing access to improve Bing’s AI accuracy but respects opt‑out decisions.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection method is the User‑Agent string containing bintellibot or BingIntelligentBot. Behavioral fingerprints include a steady request rate from Azure IPs, a From header with a contact email ([email protected]), and a Referer header often pointing to bing.com. Log entries may show a consistent pattern of 10–15 requests per minute with short inter‑request intervals.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used to train Microsoft’s large language models for Bing’s generative AI features, improve snippet relevance, and update the Bing knowledge graph. Microsoft states that content is processed in compliance with its privacy policy and only publicly available pages are fetched. The data is not used for third‑party training outside Microsoft’s ecosystem.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

While bintellibot is legitimate, its high crawl volume can strain servers. Rate limiting is applied with thresholds such as 30 requests per minute per IP to prevent overload while still allowing indexing for AI enhancements. This balance ensures fair resource usage without blocking essential crawler activity.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.