🤖 Overview

The mse360 bot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Microsoft Corporation, primarily used to index web content for the Bing search engine and to support Microsoft’s AI‑powered search features, such as Bing Chat and Microsoft Copilot. According to Microsoft’s official documentation on Bing webmaster tools, mse360 is one of several user‑agent strings employed by the Bing crawler fleet, distinct from the more commonly seen bingbot and msnbot. Its purpose is to collect publicly available web pages to improve search result relevance, generate snippet previews, and feed data into Microsoft’s large‑language models for generative AI responses. The bot is thoroughly documented on Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines page (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8c184ec0) and in the Microsoft Support articles for Bing Search.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The mse360 crawler follows the same technical patterns as other Bing crawlers. It issues HTTP GET requests with standard headers, respects If‑Modified‑Since and ETag caching directives, and typically requests pages at a rate of 1–2 requests per second per IP address, though burst rates can be higher. Microsoft publishes the IP address ranges used by its crawlers in the Microsoft Azure IP Ranges JSON file (available at https://www.microsoft.com/en‑us/download/details.aspx?id=56519), and mse360 traffic originates from IP blocks allocated to Microsoft’s datacenters in the US, Europe, and Asia. The bot supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, and it respects robots.txt with a default crawl delay of 0.5 seconds per page unless overridden. It also uses the Accept‑Encoding: gzip, deflate, br header to save bandwidth. Crawl patterns prioritize pages with higher page rank and freshness signals, as documented in Bing’s Crawl Control feature in Bing Webmaster Tools.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Microsoft explicitly states in its Bing Webmaster Guidelines that mse360 fully obeys Disallow directives in robots.txt, including wildcard patterns and Crawl‑Delay instructions. The official Bing Crawler documentation (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use‑8c184ec0) confirms that all Bing bots, including mse360, are programmed to parse and adhere to robots.txt before fetching any page. Independent testing by webmasters has verified that mse360 ceases crawling when a Disallow: / rule is present, and it respects per‑path exclusions as well. The bot also checks robots.txt at regular intervals (usually every 24 hours) for updates.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identification signal for mse360 is its User‑Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; mse360/3.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) — note that this string includes the Bingbot homepage URL for verification. Secondary indicators include a From header set to [email protected] and the absence of typical browser plugins (e.g., no Accept‑Language or cookies). The bot may also present an X‑MSE‑Crawler header in some instances, though this is not documented. Reverse DNS lookups on crawling IPs resolve to hostnames ending in .msedge.net or .akadns.net, as per Microsoft’s infrastructure. Log entries often show patterns of TLS 1.2/1.3 connections and rapid sequential requests to a site’s sitemap or robots.txt.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by mse360 is fed directly into the Bing Search Index, which powers all Bing search results, featured snippets, knowledge panels, and the generative search summaries shown in Bing Chat. Microsoft also uses crawled content to train and improve its GPT‑based Copilot models and Microsoft Prometheus AI, as disclosed in the company’s AI privacy policies (https://privacy.microsoft.com/en‑us/privacystatement). The data is processed to extract keywords, entities, and semantic relationships, and it is retained for indexing purposes. No personal information is intentionally collected, and Microsoft provides a Block URL tool in Bing Webmaster Tools for site owners to exclude content.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although mse360 is a legitimate crawler, its aggressive crawling patterns — especially on high‑traffic sites with millions of pages — may overload smaller web servers if left unthrottled. Rate‑limiting by threshold (e.g., limiting requests to 10 per second per IP) is recommended to protect server resources while still allowing the bot to index important content, as even legitimate bots can cause performance degradation when operating at maximum allowed speeds.

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