When we tell clients we’ve set up Bing Webmaster Tools on their new site, the usual response is a polite “does anyone use Bing?” Fair question. Very few of your customers will type a search into Bing on purpose. But plenty of them will ask Microsoft Copilot, use an AI assistant that sources answers through Microsoft, or search on a laptop where Bing is the default and never got changed.
Bing is no longer just a search engine with a small market share. It’s one of the big indexes AI tools draw on, and it takes about fifteen minutes to make sure it knows your site properly.
Why Bing’s index matters for AI search
Microsoft Copilot answers questions using Bing’s index. That’s the clearest link, and Copilot is built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365, so it’s in front of a lot of office workers and tradies’ admin staff every day.
The relationship goes further. In June 2026 Microsoft announced Web IQ, which it describes as “a search engine for AI systems”, built on “the Bing global index”. It’s a service other AI products can use to find and check web information. Search Engine Land’s coverage of the launch reported that OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses it for some of its web answers.
Be careful not to overstate this. ChatGPT draws on several sources, and research by Peec AI into where ChatGPT’s search results come from found Google data, OpenAI’s own crawler and licensed partners in the mix, warning plainly that “Bing is not a proxy” for ChatGPT visibility. So ranking well in Bing doesn’t guarantee ChatGPT will mention you. What’s clear is that if Bing hasn’t indexed your site properly, you’ve cut yourself out of one of the main pipes these tools draw from.
What Bing Webmaster Tools gives you
It’s Microsoft’s version of Google Search Console, and it’s free. You can see which pages Bing has indexed, what searches you appear for, crawl errors, and backlinks pointing to your site.
The newer addition is AI reporting. Since early 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has offered AI performance data showing when your pages are cited in Copilot answers, Bing’s AI summaries and some partner integrations. At the time of writing it was still labelled a preview, and the numbers for most small sites are modest. But it’s one of the very few places any search company shows you how often you’re used as a source in AI answers, which makes it worth a look each month.
Setting it up, step by step
1. Sign in
Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. Use an account the business owns, not a staff member’s personal login, so you don’t lose access when someone leaves.
2. Import from Google Search Console (the fast way)
If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, choose the import option. Bing pulls across your verified sites and sitemaps and verifies them automatically. This is how we do it on almost every site, because it takes about two minutes.
If you haven’t set up Search Console yet, do that first. Our guide to Google Search Console walks through it.
3. Or add the site manually
If you’d rather not connect Google, add your site URL and verify ownership with one of three methods: upload an XML file to your site, add a meta tag to your homepage, or add a CNAME record to your DNS. On WordPress, most SEO plugins have a field where you paste the Bing verification code, which is the simplest of the three.
4. Submit your sitemap
Under Sitemaps, add your sitemap URL. On a WordPress site running Yoast SEO or Rank Math, it’s usually yoursite.com.au/sitemap_index.xml. On Shopify, it’s yoursite.com.au/sitemap.xml.
5. Turn on IndexNow
IndexNow is a protocol Bing supports that lets your site ping search engines the moment a page is published or updated, rather than waiting to be recrawled. Google doesn’t use it, but Bing and several others do. In WordPress, Yoast SEO Premium and Rank Math’s Instant Indexing module both handle it, and there’s an official IndexNow plugin too. Shopify and some hosting platforms support it automatically.
For a small business, the practical benefit is that a new service page or updated opening hours reach Bing (and so Copilot) in days rather than weeks.
6. Check the first results
Give it a few days, then check the URL Inspection tool on your homepage and main service pages. If anything shows as not indexed, the tool usually tells you why.
What to check each month
Once it’s set up, a five-minute monthly look is plenty:
- Search Performance. Which queries you appear for. Watch your business name and your main services.
- AI Performance. Whether any pages are being cited, and which ones.
- Site Scan or recommendations. Bing flags missing titles, broken links and similar issues. Fix the ones on pages that matter.
- Indexing problems. Pages Bing has found but excluded.
If your brand name barely appears in Bing’s search data, that’s a sign of a wider recognition gap. Our piece on brand searches in the AI era covers what to do about it.
Don’t forget Bing Places
Bing has its own version of Google Business Profile, called Bing Places for Business. It can import your details from Google Business Profile, which makes it a quick job. Bing uses it for its maps and local results, so it’s part of what Microsoft’s tools have to work with when someone asks a local question. Worth claiming while you’re there.
What we do on every build
Every site we launch, whether it’s a concrete contractor like Grind & Seal Concrete or a health practice, is set up in Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics before handover, because nobody remembers to do it six months later.
If you’re not sure whether your current site is set up in Bing, ask whoever built it. If the answer is a shrug, that’s something we sort out as part of our web design work, or as a standalone setup under our SEO service. And once you’re indexed, well-written FAQs on your service pages give Copilot something worth quoting.