In short. Crawl Control sets hourly Bingbot crawl intensity relative to an automatic baseline, while robots.txt Crawl-delay takes precedence.
Definition: Bingbot is Bing's web crawler. As of October 2026, Crawl Control in Bing Webmaster Tools lets website owners set a faster or slower crawl rate for each hour of the day, relative to a baseline that Bing determines automatically for the site.
Key facts
- Bing's Crawl Control documentation describes a schedule covering all 24 hours, with traffic presets and a custom hourly pattern.
- Bing's Bingbot troubleshooting guide says that Bingbot follows Crawl Control input when a Crawl-delay directive is absent.
- Bing's crawl error alerts reference includes an alert for crawl settings that prevent effective crawling and calls for increasing the configured rate.
How does a traffic preset set the schedule?
The Crawl Control help page links to the Crawl Control tool. Its presets appear under Time when your site receives most of the traffic. Selecting the site's busiest period produces a pattern with slower crawling during that period and faster crawling during the remaining hours. Save changes stores the setting.
The schedule uses local time. Bing takes the system time into account when determining the default time zone. The Time zone dropdown allows a different zone, including when the person configuring the schedule works in another country.
How does the custom hourly pattern work?
Bing's custom pattern instructions describe holding the left mouse button over the chart's cubes and dragging to change the number of blue quadrants for an hour. The horizontal axis represents the timeline. More blue quadrants mean faster crawling; fewer mean slower crawling.
The default is five blue quadrants per time slice. These represent the site's automatically determined baseline crawl rate. Raising or lowering the pattern adjusts the rate relative to that baseline. Save changes stores the custom pattern.
What can override the hourly schedule?
A robots.txt file supplies instructions to crawlers. Bing's Crawl Control documentation states that a Crawl-delay directive in that file takes precedence over the tool's settings.
The Bingbot troubleshooting guide gives this example:
User-agent: Bingbot
Crawl-delay: 5
In this example, Bingbot can crawl one URL within each five-second window.
How are excessive or insufficient crawling checked?
Bing's overcrawling instructions start with verifying that requests come from a valid Bingbot server. A user-agent string, which identifies the requesting software, can be spoofed. The guide calls for checking the IP address with the Verify Bingbot tool. For an unresolved overcrawling report, Bing asks for server log samples showing the crawler's activity over a period of time.
For insufficient crawling, Bing's alerts reference identifies Increase crawl rate as a crawl politeness alert. Its action message asks for a higher rate in Crawl Control. A separate Crawl delay setting alert asks for removing the robots.txt delay and configuring the rate in the tool.
Related terms
FAQ
Can I use a different time zone from my computer's?
Yes. Bing's Crawl Control help says you can select another zone from the Time zone dropdown and modify the pattern accordingly.
What should I check before reporting excessive Bingbot traffic?
The Bingbot troubleshooting guide asks you to verify the bot's IP address with Verify Bingbot. Keep server log samples available for an unresolved report.
Sources
- Bing Webmaster Tools, "Crawl control", undated, article content
- Bing Webmaster Tools, "How do I report an issue with Bingbot?", undated, article content
- Bing Webmaster Tools, "List of crawl error alerts", undated, article content
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