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:

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.