If you have only ever set up Google Search Console, Bing is probably a blind spot in your reports. Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free version of Search Console. It shows how Bing crawls (visits) and indexes (stores) your pages, which searches bring you traffic, and what technical problems it has found. If your site is already in Search Console, setup takes about ten minutes.
In this guide I cover how to add and verify a site, how to send sitemaps and set up IndexNow, and which reports I think are worth checking once data starts to come in. I also explain why Bing’s index matters more than its own search share suggests.
Why Bing Webmaster Tools Is Worth Your Time
Bing’s own search results are only part of the story. Its index also feeds other products. So when Bing crawls and indexes your pages, it affects how you show up in more places than bing.com.
- Microsoft Copilot uses Bing search results to back up its answers with current web information. Pages Bing has not indexed are much harder for Copilot to find and cite.
- Yahoo search has used Bing for its organic (non-paid) results for many years.
- DuckDuckGo says in its help pages that its standard links and images come largely from Bing.
- Developers and AI agents. Microsoft retired the public Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025. It pointed customers to Grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents. Bing’s index now reaches many third-party tools that way instead.
There is also a practical reason. Bing Webmaster Tools gives you some things Search Console does not. You get a backlink report for any site, a keyword research tool with impression data, and a site audit you can run when you want. Even if Bing sends you only a little traffic, I find those tools useful on their own.
How to Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools
Go to the Bing Webmaster Tools homepage and sign in with a Microsoft or Google account. You then get two ways to add a site.
Option 1: Import From Google Search Console
This is the fastest route, and it’s the one I recommend for most sites. Bing asks for permission to read your Search Console account. Then it lists the verified sites you can import.
- Choose Import on the welcome screen.
- Sign in to the Google account that owns your Search Console properties and allow access.
- Pick the sites you want and confirm the import.
Imported sites are verified automatically, and their sitemaps come across too. Bing’s announcement of the import feature says you can import up to 100 sites at a time. Bing also re-checks your ownership against Search Console from time to time. If you later remove that access, you will need to verify the site another way.
The import does not bring over your Search Console performance data. Bing collects its own data from the day you add the site. It can take up to 48 hours to appear.
Option 2: Add the Site Manually
Enter your site URL, then choose one of these ways to verify it:
- XML file. Download
BingSiteAuth.xmland upload it to the root (top folder) of your site. Leave it there after verification. - Meta tag. Paste the
msvalidate.01meta tag into the<head>of your homepage. Most SEO plugins and site builders have a box for it. - CNAME record. Add a CNAME record to your DNS (your domain’s settings) that points the given name to
verify.bing.com. DNS changes can take a while to spread. - Domain Connect. If your DNS provider supports the Domain Connect standard, Bing can add the record for you after you sign in to the provider.
Here is how I choose. If your developer controls the server but you manage the CMS, the meta tag is usually quickest. If the site is about to be rebuilt, I use DNS verification so it survives the redesign.
Add other people through User management instead of sharing your login. That way access stays with the business when someone leaves. Shared logins are one of the most common access problems I come across.
Submitting Sitemaps to Bing
If you imported from Search Console, check the Sitemaps report to make sure your sitemaps arrived. If you added the site manually, submit them yourself. Enter the full sitemap URL.
Bing accepts XML sitemaps, sitemap index files, RSS, Atom and plain text lists of URLs. You can also add your sitemap to robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, so any crawler can find it.
The report shows when Bing last read each sitemap, its status and how many URLs it found. A few habits I stick to:
- List only canonical (main version), indexable URLs that return a 200 status. Redirects and noindexed pages in a sitemap send mixed signals.
- Keep
lastmoddates accurate. Bing has said it uses this date to decide what to crawl again. Stamping every URL with today’s date ruins that signal. - Resubmit after big changes such as a migration. For day-to-day updates, IndexNow is the better tool.
IndexNow: What It Is and How to Turn It On
IndexNow is an open protocol (a shared set of rules). It lets your site tell search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted. You don’t wait for a crawler to come back and notice the change. You send a short message, and the engine can put that URL near the front of the queue.
Microsoft Bing and Yandex launched it in October 2021. Engines that support it agree to share submitted URLs with each other. So one message reaches all of them.
Which Search Engines Use IndexNow
Engines that support IndexNow include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz and Yep. In May 2025, Microsoft also said Amazon planned to start using the protocol.
Google does not use IndexNow. It said in 2021 that it was testing the protocol, but it has not adopted it. So you still need sitemaps and good internal links for Google. If you want to know how Google decides what to crawl, our guide to crawl budget and how to improve it covers that side.
How IndexNow Works
You create an API key (a long code) and host it in a text file on your domain to prove you own it. Then you send URLs to an IndexNow endpoint (the address that receives them). You can send a single URL with a simple GET request:
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/new-page/&key=YOUR_KEYFor bulk updates, you send a JSON POST with your host, key and a list of URLs. The IndexNow documentation allows up to 10,000 URLs per POST.
POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
{
"host": "www.example.com",
"key": "YOUR_KEY",
"urlList": [
"https://www.example.com/products/blue-widget/",
"https://www.example.com/blog/spring-guide/"
]
}A 200 or 202 response means the submission was received. A 403 usually means the key file can’t be found or doesn’t match. A 422 means the URLs don’t belong to the host you named.
The Easy Ways to Turn It On
Most site owners never need to write code for this:
- WordPress: Microsoft publishes an official IndexNow plugin, and several SEO plugins include IndexNow as a setting.
- Cloudflare: the Crawler Hints feature can send IndexNow messages for sites behind Cloudflare.
- Hosted platforms: Wix and Shopify support IndexNow. Check your platform’s settings before you add anything.
- Custom sites: send a POST from your CMS whenever content is published, updated or deleted.
Only submit URLs that have really changed. Pinging unchanged pages many times a day does not help, and your requests can get slowed down. Bing Webmaster Tools has an IndexNow section where you can see the URLs it received through the protocol. I check it after any plugin update, because that’s when I usually see submissions quietly stop.
Keep in mind that IndexNow speeds up discovery. It does not guarantee indexing. Each engine still decides if a page is worth keeping.
URL Inspection
URL Inspection is where I go first when a specific page is missing from Bing. Paste in a URL. It tells you if the page is indexed, if crawling and indexing were allowed, and which canonical URL applies.
It also shows when Bing first found the URL and when it last crawled it. That date is often the quickest clue. If the page changed last week and Bing last crawled it two months ago, you have a discovery problem, not a content problem.
Use Live URL to test the current version of the page. Then check the SEO and markup sections for issues such as missing alt text or a missing language attribute. If everything looks right, request indexing from the same screen.
For a single page, URL Inspection or the URL Submission tool is fine. For anything regular, set up IndexNow so you aren’t doing it by hand.
Search Performance: Bing’s Traffic Report
Search Performance is the closest match to Google’s Performance report. It shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, split by keywords and pages.
Microsoft has grown it step by step. History went from six months to 16 months in October 2024. Date comparisons arrived in March 2025. In August 2025, Bing extended the data to 24 months and added country and device filters. Two years of history makes seasonal patterns much easier to spot.
Here is how I use this report:
- Compare with Google. Pull the same date range in Search Console. Look for pages that do well on one engine but not the other. Big gaps often point to indexing or title differences.
- Find high-impression, low-click searches. These are usually title and meta description problems you can fix quickly.
- Check desktop on its own. Bing’s audience leans more towards desktop than Google’s. So the device filter can change the picture for B2B sites.
If you are newer to search reports, our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console reports explains clicks, impressions and position in more depth. The same meanings apply here.
Site Scan: A Free Technical Audit
Site Scan is a crawler built into Bing Webmaster Tools that you run when you want. You start a new scan, give it a name, choose the scope and set a page limit. Bing then crawls your site and gives you a list of issues.
Findings are grouped by how serious they are:
- Errors can stop pages being indexed. Fix these first.
- Warnings may hurt performance, such as missing or very long titles.
- Notices are lower-priority suggestions.
Each issue shows how many pages it affects. So you can fix sitewide template problems before one-off pages, which is always my order. For small and mid-sized sites, I think it’s a fair free alternative to a paid crawler. If it flags many duplicate titles and descriptions, read our guide to duplicate content and how search engines handle it before you start rewriting.
The Recommendations section replaced the older Top Insights area in 2024. It works alongside Site Scan by showing sitewide issues Bing finds during normal crawling.
Backlinks
The Backlinks report shows the sites linking to you, the pages they link to and the anchor text (the clickable words) used. It’s based on Bing’s own crawl. So it won’t match third-party link tools exactly, and that’s fine. I cover Google’s version in my guide to the Search Console Links report.
The best feature is the similar sites comparison. You can enter a competitor’s domain, even one you haven’t verified, and compare their links with yours. It’s a quick way to find sites that link to several competitors but not to you.
There is also a Disavow links tool for pages or domains you don’t want linked to your site. In my experience, most sites never need it. Save it for links you know are manipulative.
Keyword Research
The Keyword Research tool uses Bing’s own search data. Enter a term and choose a country. It gives you impression trends for that keyword, plus related keywords and question-style searches.
It also shows the top-ranking URLs on Bing for the term. That gives you a quick look at what kind of page wins. You can export results to CSV.
Treat Bing impressions as a relative signal. They help you compare two ways of wording something, or spot a seasonal rise. But they reflect Bing’s audience, not total demand across all search engines.
Robots.txt Tester
The robots.txt tester checks your file for problems that could stop Bingbot crawling properly. Enter a URL. It tells you if that URL is allowed or blocked for Bingbot and other Microsoft user agents, and which rule is responsible.
The editor shows your file for each protocol and host version. So you can catch a staging-style Disallow: / left on the www version. You can edit the rules and test again straight away. Then download the fixed file, upload it to your root and ask Bing to fetch the new version.
A typical use: before you block a faceted navigation path (filter pages like colour or size), test a few product and filter URLs. Make sure the pattern blocks only what you mean it to. I never push a robots.txt change without this check.
Other Tools Worth Knowing
- Crawl Control lets you set how hard Bingbot crawls your site at different hours. It helps if your server struggles at busy times.
- Site Explorer shows your site as a folder tree, with crawl, index and traffic numbers for each section.
- Block URLs removes a page from Bing results for a while, until you fix or remove it properly.
- Verify Bingbot checks if an IP address in your logs really belongs to Bing.
- Copilot in Bing Webmaster Tools opened to all English-language users in March 2025. It lets you ask questions about your own site data in plain language.
A Simple Monthly Routine
You don’t need to live in Bing Webmaster Tools. I think once a month is enough for most sites:
- Check Search Performance against the previous period. Note any pages with large drops.
- Review the Sitemaps report for errors, or sitemaps that haven’t been read recently.
- Open Recommendations and fix any new errors.
- Run a Site Scan after big site changes or template updates.
- Make sure IndexNow submissions are still arriving after any plugin or platform change.
Getting Started With Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is free and quick to set up. It shows you an index that feeds Bing, Copilot, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Import your sites from Search Console, check your sitemaps, turn on IndexNow, then use URL Inspection and Search Performance to keep an eye on things.
My suggested next step is to compare your top pages in Bing Webmaster Tools with the same pages in Google. If one engine ranks a page the other ignores, check if it’s competing with similar pages on your site. Our guide to finding and fixing keyword cannibalization walks you through that.
