Rattlesnakes By Mail

Bingbot vs GPTBot

Bingbot and GPTBot compared on 12 documented fields, from 19 claims, last verified 2026-09-14.

How many of the compared fields have the same answer for both crawlers, and how many differ.

Bingbot and GPTBot, fields comparedBingbot and GPTBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 10 fields, out of 12 fields in total.Same: 2 fieldsSame2Different: 10 fieldsDifferent10
Bingbot and GPTBot, fields compared. Different is the largest with 10 fields, out of 12 fields in total. Source: each vendor's own crawler documentation, quoted and dated on every claim page.
FieldBingbotGPTBotComparison
cites_sourcesyesnot documenteddifferent
follows_noarchiveyesnot documenteddifferent
honours_crawl_delayyesnot_documenteddifferent
opt_out_mechanismyesnot documenteddifferent
publishes_ip_listyesyessame
purpose_documentedyestrainingdifferent
reads_llms_txtnot_documentednot documenteddifferent
respects_robots_txtyesyessame
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedyesdifferent
separate_search_and_training_tokensnoyesdifferent
user_agent_string_fullMozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbotdifferent
verifiable_by_rdnsyesnot_documenteddifferent

Differences

FieldBingbot statementGPTBot statement
cites_sourcesCopilot Search in Bing delivers clearly cited sources alongside generative answers to support publishers and content owners.not documented
follows_noarchiveBingbot excludes noarchive-tagged content from Copilot and Chat answers and from generative AI training data.not documented
honours_crawl_delayMicrosoft states that a crawl-delay directive in robots.txt always takes precedence over Bing Webmaster Tools crawl control settings for Bingbot.OpenAI does not publish whether GPTBot honours the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.
opt_out_mechanismMicrosoft lets publishers block Bingbot content from Copilot answers and AI training using noarchive and nocache tags.not documented
purpose_documentedBingbot serves as Microsoft's standard crawler and handles most of Bing's daily web crawling.GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI generative AI foundation models.
reads_llms_txtMicrosoft does not publish whether Bingbot reads llms.txt files.not documented
robots_txt_fetch_markernot documentedOpenAI may add a robots.txt marker to the GPTBot user agent string when GPTBot fetches robots.txt files.
separate_search_and_training_tokensMicrosoft controls Bingbot's use in AI training through meta tags rather than publishing a separate training-specific crawler token.OpenAI separates search and training controls into two robots.txt tokens: OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training.
user_agent_string_fullBingbot sends a user agent string containing bingbot/2.0 and a link to Microsoft's bingbot.htm page.GPTBot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; GPTBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/gptbot.
verifiable_by_rdnsMicrosoft verifies Bingbot traffic through reverse DNS lookups that resolve to hostnames ending in search.msn.com.OpenAI does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for GPTBot.

Sources