Content ingestion crawler operated by Microsoft for MSN and Microsoft Start. It fetches articles from publisher sites whose content is distributed on those platforms, and the ContentProfiling variant profiles the retrieved articles for classification and ranking. Publishers normally opt in to this distribution through the MSN Partner Hub, so this agent is usually expected traffic on partner sites rather than unsolicited crawling. Microsoft documents the partner feed programme but does not publish this user-agent string or a reverse-DNS verification method for it.

At a glance

Operator: Microsoft
Type: Aggregator

How Centinel checks it

User agent: The request calls itself this crawler. Anyone can send the same string.

Microsoft News Ingestion publishes nothing Centinel can check a source against, so a match reports the name and leaves the source unconfirmed. The match tokens, verification domains, and address feeds are not published here.

Allowing or blocking it

The crawler object in the /validate response sets access_allowed to true only for a verified source that your tenant allowlists. A policy rule can allow or block this crawler by its category, Aggregator.

Back to the crawler catalog