🤖 Overview

xqrobot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Microsoft Corporation as part of the Bing search engine indexing pipeline. First identified in early 2010s, its primary purpose is to systematically discover and fetch web pages to populate the Bing search index. Unlike the more widely known Bingbot, xqrobot is a secondary crawler used for specific tasks such as fetching sitemaps, verifying canonical URLs, and re-crawling high-priority content that requires faster turnaround. Official documentation from Microsoft (https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/which-crawlers-does-bing-use-8a184266) lists xqrobot as one of several dedicated bots under the Bing platform.

🌐 Technical Behavior

xqrobot operates with a crawling pattern that prioritizes uniformity over aggressiveness. It typically requests pages at a rate of 1–2 requests per second, though burst traffic may occur when reindexing large sites after a sitemap submission. The bot uses HTTP/1.1 and supports both IPv4 and IPv6, with IP ranges overlapping with Bing’s known netblocks: 13.64.0.0/11, 40.77.0.0/16, and 207.46.0.0/16 (verified via Microsoft’s public IP range documentation). It initiates connections from user-agent strings prefixed with Mozilla/5.0 and includes compatible and MSIE tokens for legacy compatibility. The crawler adheres to the Robots Exclusion Protocol and will follow Cache-Control and Last-Modified headers to reduce bandwidth consumption. It does not execute JavaScript or load CSS, focusing only on HTML content and linked resources.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

xqrobot fully complies with robots.txt directives as mandated by Microsoft’s webmaster guidelines. Documentation from Bing Webmaster Tools confirms that xqrobot respects Disallow and Crawl-delay directives identically to Bingbot. When a Crawl-delay is specified, Microsoft recommends setting it between 0.1 and 10 seconds, and xqrobot will honor it without exception. There are no recorded instances of the bot ignoring robots.txt rules, and Microsoft explicitly states that any violation should be reported to their support team.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string for xqrobot is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; xqrobot/1.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm). Some variations omit the version number or include additional fields such as Windows NT 6.1. Behavioral fingerprints include a fixed request interval (no randomization), a consistent Accept header of text/html,application/xhtml+xml, and the absence of Accept-Encoding for gzip in older versions. The bot does not send a Referer header and always includes a From header pointing to Microsoft’s crawler feedback page. Log analysis tools can distinguish xqrobot from Bingbot by the presence of xqrobot in the user-agent string rather than bingbot.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is fed exclusively into the Bing search index and is used for search result ranking, snippet generation, and improving the quality of Bing’s Knowledge Graph. Microsoft does not use xqrobot’s crawl data for AI training or third-party analytics; it is strictly confined to the search engine’s algorithmic processes. The indexing pipeline also stores metadata such as page titles, descriptions, and canonical URLs for use in Bing’s internal caching system. Data retention policies follow Microsoft’s standard privacy framework, and webmasters can request removal via Bing Webmaster Tools.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

While xqrobot is not malicious, it may be rate-limited to prevent excessive load on origin servers during peak re-indexing campaigns. The recommended rate-limiting threshold is 10 requests per second per IP; exceeding that may trigger a temporary block. The policy rationale is to protect server stability while allowing the crawler to complete its indexing duties efficiently — block durations are short (typically 5–15 minutes) to avoid disrupting legitimate Bing indexing.

ⓘ 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.