Bing Webmaster Tools: how to add your site, submit URLs and why Bing matters beyond Bing

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free service for website owners to see how Bing crawls, indexes and shows their site, and to tell Bing about new pages. It is Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console. In Microsoft's own June 2025 overview, its main parts are Search Performance (clicks, impressions and average position, with up to 16 months of data), URL Inspection, Site Explorer, Sitemaps, IndexNow and URL submission, backlinks, keyword research, Site Scan, a robots.txt tester and crawl control.

Bing SEO is mostly the same work as Google SEO: crawlable pages, clear titles, useful content, clean links. The difference is that you only see Bing's view of your site, and only get to submit URLs to Bing directly, once your site is in Bing Webmaster Tools.

How to add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools

Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, then either import your sites from Google Search Console or add a site by URL and verify it. Bing's add and verify help page describes both paths. Import is faster if you already use Search Console.

1. Sign in and open My Sites

   Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account or sign in. Bing offers two ways to add a site: import from Search Console, or add it manually by URL. Existing users add a site from the site dropdown in the left navigation.

2. Choose Import and allow access to Search Console

   Bing asks for permission to read your Search Console account, then lists your verified sites with their sitemaps and your role on each.

3. Select the sites and click Import

   Selected sites are added and verified automatically. Bing's import announcement (updated June 2025) says you can import up to 100 sites at a time, within the limit of 1,000 sites per account.

4. Wait about 48 hours for data

   Bing says it usually takes 48 hours for its system to generate analytics and data for a newly added site.

Keep the Search Console link in place. Bing re-checks ownership periodically through it, and imports any new sitemaps it finds there at the same time. If you disconnect it, you will need to verify another way.

How to verify a site manually in Bing

If you do not use Search Console, add the site by URL and prove ownership with one of four methods. Bing lists them as:

How to submit a sitemap to Bing

Open Sitemaps, click Submit sitemaps and enter the sitemap URL; also list it in robots.txt so Bing finds it on its own. Bing's sitemaps help accepts XML sitemaps, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0, and plain text files with one URL per line. The Sitemaps page shows every sitemap Bing knows about, whether you submitted it, imported it from Search Console, or Bing found it, with the last processing date, status and URLs discovered. Click a sitemap to see its exact errors.

The robots.txt line is one directive: Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. If you are editing robots.txt anyway, check you are not blocking bingbot by accident; our guide to allowing or blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt lists which tokens control what.

URL submission and IndexNow: which should you use?

Use IndexNow for routine notifications, and the Submit URLs tool for a handful of urgent pages. Bing's URL submission help strongly recommends IndexNow, says manual submission and the submission APIs may be deprecated in future, and gives these limits:

To set up IndexNow, the IndexNow documentation says to host a UTF-8 text file named after your key at the site root, then send URLs by GET (one) or JSON POST (many). Participating engines share submitted URLs with each other. A 200 response means the URL was received, not that it will be indexed. Many CMS plugins and CDNs do this for you; Bing shows the activity under the IndexNow tab.

What the Bing Webmaster Tools reports show

Start with Search Performance and URL Inspection; use the rest when something looks wrong.

• Search Performance: clicks, impressions, click rate and average position by query and page. Bing's numbers are separate from Google's; never add the two positions together.
• URL Inspection: one URL's index status, crawlability, response code and blocked resources.
• Site Explorer: your site's structure as Bing sees it, with indexed pages, crawl blocks and errors by folder.
• Backlinks: referring domains and anchor text for your site, and for competitors.
• Site Scan and Recommendations: an audit for broken links, duplicate tags and missing metadata, and a prioritized fix list.
• AI Performance (public preview): launched in February 2026, it shows total citations, average cited pages per day, grounding queries and page-level citation counts across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Microsoft says grounding queries are sampled, and a citation count does not show placement or ranking.

Whatever Bing shows, the fixes are ordinary on-page work; our on-page SEO checklist covers them item by item.

Why Bing matters beyond Bing: Copilot and ChatGPT search

Bing's index feeds Microsoft's AI answers, and OpenAI names Microsoft among the search providers ChatGPT search may query, so being crawlable and indexed by Bing matters beyond bing.com. Here is exactly what each company says, and no more.

• Microsoft, on Copilot. The Bing Webmaster Guidelines say they describe how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates and surfaces content across Bing search, Copilot and grounding API results, and that following them helps make URLs eligible for grounding results and citations. They list IndexNow, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and relevant external links as the ways to make URLs discoverable.
• Microsoft, on controls. The same guidelines say NOARCHIVE keeps content out of Copilot responses and grounding results, and NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. They also say GEO, like SEO, guarantees nothing: it affects eligibility for citation, not citation itself.
• OpenAI, on ChatGPT search. OpenAI's ChatGPT search help says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, sending them rewritten queries, and points to the Microsoft privacy statement for how those providers handle queries. It does not say what share of results come from Bing. To be eligible for ChatGPT search, OpenAI says to allow OAI-SearchBot and let traffic from OpenAI's published IP addresses through your host or CDN.

The practical takeaway: get into Bing Webmaster Tools, make sure bingbot and OAI-SearchBot can crawl you, keep sitemaps and IndexNow current, and watch AI Performance. Claims that Bing indexing or IndexNow directly raises ChatGPT visibility go beyond what either company states. To see whether ChatGPT actually names you, see how to check if ChatGPT mentions your brand.

What MrKeyword imports from Bing Webmaster Tools

MrKeyword connects to Bing Webmaster Tools with read-only access and syncs each of your websites once a day, keeping Bing's numbers separate from Google's. You connect it once in Settings. MrKeyword matches each website to a verified site in your Bing account (the exact URL first, then the same host with or without www); if the site is not verified in Bing, it says so and checks again the next day.

In Rank Tracking, a tracked keyword gets a Bing row when it matches queries in Bing's report. Bing does not report country, device or the ranking URL there, so MrKeyword leaves those blank rather than guessing.

What MrKeyword does not do

• It does not add or verify your site in Bing. Do that in Bing Webmaster Tools first; MrKeyword only reads verified sites.
• It does not submit URLs, sitemaps or IndexNow pings on your behalf. Its Bing access is read-only.
• It does not import Bing's AI Performance report or URL Inspection. Open those in Bing Webmaster Tools. For AI answers, MrKeyword runs its own checks in AI visibility.
• It does not merge Bing and Google. Clicks, impressions and positions stay per engine, because the two measure different result pages.
• It cannot show more than Bing reports. Bing's query and page lists are its top rows, refreshed on Bing's schedule, and anything Bing omits stays omitted.

Questions and answers