How to Stop Bing Bots From Over-Crawling Your Website
If you run a website long enough, you’ll eventually notice spikes in server load caused by automated crawlers. Crawlers are essential for search engines to discover and index content, but not all of them behave the same. While Googlebot is generally well-optimized and respectful of crawl budgets, Bing’s bots have earned a reputation among many webmasters for being far more aggressive. Before I start, let me tell you, I already tried Crawl control that they offer within Bing Webmaster tool and Robots.txt Crawl-delay: 2, nothing works.
What makes it even worse is that Bing often crawls pages that don’t even exist. For example, they’ll request /wp-admin, /blog, or completely random URLs—even on sites that have no WordPress or CMS installed whatsoever. This means their bots aren’t actually looking at your real content but are blindly hammering servers with unnecessary traffic.
Bing excessive crawl and spike on server!!
Recently, I experienced this firsthand when Bing’s bots overwhelmed my site, making me rethink whether I even want my content indexed by them at all.
Why Block Bing Bots?
If you would like to know the bad bots and good bots. How to stop bad bots in Google analytics please read this article. Going back to the main point here, why I decided to blocked the Bing bots:
Excessive Server Load: Millions of hits in a short time can overload servers, especially if you’re on shared hosting or running a resource-heavy CMS like WordPress.
Disregard for Robots.txt: Unlike Google, Bing often ignores directives, leading to wasted resources.
Low Traffic Yield: If Bing traffic is a negligible portion of your audience, the crawl load is unjustifiable.
Bypassing Protection: Even with Cloudflare, Bingbot requests often sneak through, making manual blocking necessary.
My Experience: Why I Finally Decided to Block Bing
In my case, the situation reached a breaking point. Within just one day, Bing’s bots made over 5 million requests to my server. What shocked me most was that a huge portion of these requests were for non-existent pages like /wp-admin, /blog, or even completely random strings. And here’s the kicker: my site doesn’t run WordPress or any CMS at all—those URLs don’t even exist on my server. This proves the crawling has nothing to do with actual content; Bing’s bots are simply hammering away at paths that aren’t there.
I use Cloudflare, but Bing bots still found ways to bypass protections. It almost feels like they have special allowances or paid access that lets them slip past normal defenses. The end result? My server was struggling to handle legitimate traffic, users were experiencing slower load times, and I was wasting resources on bot traffic that wasn’t adding any real value.
When I compared the return on investment, the numbers made the decision clear: I only get 2–3K visits per month from Bing, which is negligible compared to Google. Google crawls much more efficiently, sends exponentially more traffic, and never causes these headaches. So why should I keep letting Bing hammer my server?
That’s when I decided to remove my site from Bing Webmaster Tools and block their crawlers entirely—even if they come back later under different names like IndexNow. I’d rather save my server resources for Google and real human visitors. Below are few steps if you also have similar issue on how to block bing bots, this could help you.
How to Block Bing Bots
Here are some effective methods to protect your website from Bing’s crawlers: Which works for me you can also give it a try.
1. Block via .htaccess (Apache)
If you’re using Apache, add this to your .htaccess:
apache
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Edit
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} bingbot [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} BingPreview [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} adidxbot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
2. Block via Nginx
For Nginx servers, add:
nginx
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if ($http_user_agent ~* "bingbot|BingPreview|adidxbot") {
return 403;
}
3. Block Bing’s IP Ranges
Microsoft publishes their IP ranges here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53602
You can block these ranges at the firewall level. For example with ufw:
bash
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sudo ufw deny from
This keeps unwanted requests from ever reaching your server.
4. Block Bing on Cloudflare
Even if Bing tries to bypass normal blocks, you can stop them at the CDN edge before they hit your origin server.
Blocking Bing crawler from Cloudflare:
- Go to your Cloudflare Dashboard.
- Navigate to Security → WAF → Firewall Rules.
- Create a new rule.
- In the Field, select User Agent.
- Operator: contains.
- Value: bingbot, BingPreview, or adidxbot.
- Action: Block (or Managed Challenge if you want to verify).
You can also create rules based on ASN (Autonomous System Number) or IP Ranges if Bing switches user agents but still uses Microsoft networks. The ASN for Microsoft is usually AS8075.
For other CDNs or security services (like Akamai, Fastly, Sucuri, etc.), the same logic applies:
Block or challenge requests where the User Agent matches Bing bots.
Optionally, block known Microsoft IP ranges or ASN.
How to Remove Your Website from Bing Webmaster Tools
If you no longer want Bing to crawl or index your website at all, you can remove your domain from Bing Webmaster Tools.
⚠️ Keep in mind that Bing often changes its interface and settings layout, so the exact steps may vary over time. As of today, the option is located here:
- Log into Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Select the site you want to remove.
- Go to Settings → Site Management → Remove Site.
- Confirm the removal request.
Once you’ve done that, make sure to also remove any verification methods you previously added, such as:
- The meta tag in your site’s section.
- The Bing verification HTML file that you may have uploaded.
- The DNS TXT record you might have created for verification.
Removing these ensures Bing no longer considers your site verified, even if you accidentally log back into Webmaster Tools later.
Final Thoughts on Bing bots removal
Search engine traffic is valuable, but only when the trade-off makes sense. If a bot is overloading your servers, ignoring crawl directives, and barely sending you traffic, then blocking it entirely may be the best solution. Like I wrote above, I barely receive 2–3K visits per month from Bing search, and that does not justify the downtime and server strain every time their bots crawl. Bear in mind, I even tried their Crawl Control tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools, but it had no effect whatsoever.
Google and other search engines manage to crawl efficiently without causing harm—there’s no reason Bing shouldn’t do the same. Until Microsoft builds a more responsible and user-friendly bot, I’ve decided that Bing doesn’t deserve a place on my site.
If you’re dealing with the same problem, don’t hesitate to take action. Protect your resources, block Bing bots, and keep your website running smoothly for the visitors who actually matter.