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MSNBot
MicrosoftHonours robots.txt
Legacy Microsoft crawler, largely superseded by Bingbot but still seen in logs. Minimal today. Treat traffic claiming to be MSNBot with suspicion.
User-agent string
msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)
How to verify it
Reverse DNS to search.msn.com.
What blocking costs
Minimal today. Treat traffic claiming to be MSNBot with suspicion.
robots.txt rule
# Block MSNBot
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /
# Allow everything else
User-agent: *
Allow: /Robots.txt is enough
Microsoft documents MSNBot as honouring robots.txt. Verify with your logs after deploying — a spoofed agent will keep coming.
Generate a full robots.txt
Pick which AI crawlers to allow or block across all 42 agents and copy the file out.
Open the generator →Other Microsoft agents