Microsoft · Search index

msnbot

msnbot is Microsoft's crawler. This crawler fetches pages to build a search or answer index.

Crawler facts

Operator	Microsoft
User agent token	`msnbot`
Traffic type	Search index
Verification	UA + reverse DNS
IP source	Microsoft publishes no IP list.
Reverse DNS suffixes	`.search.msn.com`

What "verified" means for msnbot

For msnbot, "verified" means DataSaaS forward-confirms the PTR record under Microsoft's DNS suffix. A request that fails this reverse-DNS check is recorded as unverified.

Track it

msnbot fetches raw HTML and never runs JavaScript, so no browser tag can see it. Install the DataSaaS server-side package to record every request and verify the ones that publish IP ranges.

Read the bot-traffic setup guide

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