Bingbot vs Claude-SearchBot

Bingbot and Claude-SearchBot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-14.

Field	Bingbot	Claude-SearchBot	Comparison
cites_sources	yes	not_documented	different
follows_noarchive	yes	not documented	different
honours_crawl_delay	yes	yes	same
opt_out_mechanism	yes	not documented	different
publishes_ip_list	yes	yes	same
purpose_documented	yes	search	different
reads_llms_txt	not_documented	not_documented	same
respects_robots_txt	yes	yes	same
separate_search_and_training_tokens	no	yes	different
user_agent_string_full	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)	not_documented	different
verifiable_by_rdns	yes	not_documented	different

Differences

Field	Bingbot statement	Claude-SearchBot statement
cites_sources	Copilot Search in Bing delivers clearly cited sources alongside generative answers to support publishers and content owners.	Anthropic does not publish whether Claude search responses cite pages crawled by Claude-SearchBot.
follows_noarchive	Bingbot excludes noarchive-tagged content from Copilot and Chat answers and from generative AI training data.	not documented
opt_out_mechanism	Microsoft lets publishers block Bingbot content from Copilot answers and AI training using noarchive and nocache tags.	not documented
purpose_documented	Bingbot serves as Microsoft's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's daily web crawling.	Claude-SearchBot analyses online content to improve the relevance and accuracy of Claude search responses.
separate_search_and_training_tokens	Microsoft controls Bingbot's use in AI training through meta tags rather than publishing a separate training-specific crawler token.	Anthropic separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: Claude-SearchBot for search and ClaudeBot for training.
user_agent_string_full	Bingbot sends a user agent string containing bingbot/2.0 and a link to Microsoft's bingbot.htm page.	Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-SearchBot.
verifiable_by_rdns	Microsoft verifies Bingbot traffic through reverse DNS lookups that resolve to hostnames ending in search.msn.com.	Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-SearchBot.