Technical foundations · 5 min read
Bing Webmaster Tools and Why Bing's Index Matters
Many businesses set up Google Search Console years ago and never touched Bing. For AI answers, that gap is worth closing.
The short answer
Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing's index, and Bing has been publicly named among the search providers behind ChatGPT's search features. Verifying your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submitting a sitemap, checking for crawl errors and using IndexNow to report new or changed pages helps Bing find and refresh your content. It is free and takes under an hour.
Why Bing is not just 'the other search engine'
Microsoft states that Copilot uses Bing to ground its answers in current web results. OpenAI has said ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers, and Bing has been named among them. In other words, two of the most widely used AI assistants lean on an index many businesses have never checked.
If a page is missing from Bing's index, or Bing has an old version of it, any tool relying on Bing for that answer has less to work with. Bing's share of traditional search has always been smaller than Google's, which is exactly why it gets neglected.
Getting set up
Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft account. If you already use Google Search Console, Bing lets you import your verified sites from it, which is the fastest route. Otherwise verify ownership with a DNS record, an HTML file or a meta tag.
- Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Import from Google Search Console, or verify manually
- Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps
- Check Site Explorer and the URL Inspection tool for your key pages
Read what Bing is telling you
Once data arrives, look at which of your pages Bing has indexed and which it reports problems with. Common issues are pages blocked by robots.txt, redirect chains, duplicate pages without a clear canonical, and pages Bing has discovered but not yet crawled.
Use URL Inspection on your homepage and your most important service or product pages. It shows whether the page is indexed and when Bing last crawled it. A key page that has not been crawled in months is worth investigating.
IndexNow: tell Bing when something changes
IndexNow is a protocol, supported by Bing and some other search engines, that lets your site notify them immediately when a page is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting to be recrawled. Many content management systems and SEO plugins support it with a setting; on others you can add it through a plugin or your developer.
It does not force anything into the index or change how pages are judged. It shortens the delay between you publishing something and Bing knowing about it, which matters when you have just written a page to answer a question you were missing.
Bing Places for local businesses
Bing has its own business listing service, Bing Places, separate from Google Business Profile. It can import your Google profile to save time. Check the imported details carefully, because errors copy across just as easily as correct data.
Connect it to what you measure
Found in AI scans ChatGPT alongside Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and reports results per tool. If ChatGPT consistently leaves you out on questions where the other tools name you, your Bing coverage is one sensible thing to check, along with the crawler access covered in the guide on AI crawlers.
Your checklist
- Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account and import or verify your site
- Submit your XML sitemap
- Inspect your homepage and top five pages for index status and last crawl date
- Fix any robots.txt blocks or redirect chains Bing reports
- Turn on IndexNow in your CMS or SEO plugin, or ask your developer to add it
- Claim and check your Bing Places listing
- Compare your ChatGPT results with the other four tools in your report
Common questions
Does ChatGPT only use Bing?
OpenAI has not described its search as relying on Bing alone, and the details can change. Bing has been named among its search providers, which is reason enough to make sure your site is properly indexed there.
Is IndexNow a replacement for a sitemap?
No. Keep your sitemap. IndexNow is a way to report changes quickly; the sitemap is the full list of pages you want crawled.
Does Google support IndexNow?
Google has not adopted it. For Google, keep your sitemap current in Search Console.
Read next
Making Your Website Readable to AI Crawlers
If an AI tool cannot fetch and read your pages, nothing else in these guides matters. This is the technical check to run first.
Read the guide →Structured Data That Helps AI Tools Understand You
Structured data is a machine-readable summary of facts already on your page. It will not make up for a weak page, but it removes ambiguity about who you are.
Read the guide →What Does It Mean to Be Found in AI?
More customers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who to hire before they ever open a search page. Being found in AI is about what those answers say about you.
Read the guide →See where you stand today.
Found in AI asks five AI tools the questions your customers ask and shows where you are named, where you are linked and where a competitor is named instead.