Twitter (X) Blocks Bing Search

X, well, Twitter.com, is now blocking Bing Search, specifically Bingbot, from crawling and accessing content posted on Twitter.com, on the X platform. Twitter specifically added to its robots.txt file a directive to disallow Bingbot from crawling the content on its platform.

Here is a screenshot of its robots.txt file:

This was spotted first, I believe, by Mike Ginley who posted this on X, “Twitter blocking Bing is an interesting move…” Glenn Gabe dug into the timeline, noticing this was a fairly recent change by Bing:

As of July 1, Bing was not being blocked from crawling. By September 1, ALL bots not included specifically in the file were being blocked. And as of Oct 17, Bing was specifically being blocked. A site query reveals some very weird things for Twitter in Bing, for obvious reasons. https://t.co/hWjKgxM9q7

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 18, 2023

In fact, a site command on Bing only shows 180,000 Twitter URLs showing up:

But with Google, a site command shows 422 million URLs.

Back in July Twitter blocked Google leading to a huge drop in visibility for Twitter in Google Search. A few days later, Twitter reversed that change.

I guess Twitter / X does not want traffic from Bing Search? I mean, if they want more efficient indexing, just use IndexNow?

Forum discussion at X.