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Bing SEO for AI Search: Webmaster Tools, IndexNow and Copilot

Published 9 min read

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Cover graphic for the AI search guide "Bing SEO for AI Search: Webmaster Tools, IndexNow and Copilot" by Saad Raza SEO

Bing SEO still matters because Bing indexes the web separately from Google and Microsoft reports Bing Webmaster Tools data on how your pages appear in Copilot and AI summaries. To cover it, verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit sitemaps, use IndexNow for changes, and keep pages clear, factual and crawlable.

AI answers are changing how people click: in a 2025 analysis, Pew Research Center found Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits when there was no AI summary.

Why Bing deserves an afternoon of your time

Most of my clients, and most small businesses I speak to, treat Bing as an afterthought. Their reasoning is that Google sends the traffic, so Google gets the effort. That is reasonable for clicks. It is less reasonable for visibility in AI answers, because the AI layer is where Bing has become more interesting.

Microsoft’s own announcement of AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (published 10 February 2026) describes insights on how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. In other words, Microsoft now gives site owners a view into citations in its AI experiences. Google Search Console does not offer an equivalent breakdown that I would describe in the same terms, so Bing is currently the clearer window for that question.

A caution on what I am not claiming. Other AI products sometimes use Bing results, but I only state that where the vendor says so. OpenAI’s help page on ChatGPT search says it sometimes partners with other search providers and sends them rewritten queries; it does not tell you which source supplies any given answer. So I would not tell you that ranking in Bing guarantees a ChatGPT citation. For how ChatGPT chooses sources, read my guide to ChatGPT search SEO.

The reasons I still put Bing on the checklist are simpler:

  • It is a separate index and a separate set of crawl signals, so a page missing from Google can sometimes be fixed faster there, and vice versa.
  • The setup is short and mostly free.
  • It gives you data about AI citations that is hard to get elsewhere.
  • The work overlaps heavily with what you already do for Google, so the marginal cost is low.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools in one sitting

If you already use Google Search Console, this is quick. Microsoft’s post on importing from Search Console explains that you can verify sites by importing them from your Google account, and that the import brings across verified sites and their sitemaps. It also notes that traffic data for a newly verified site can take up to 48 hours to appear, so do not judge the first day’s empty charts.

  1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft account you will keep (ideally a shared company one, not a personal login that one person controls).
  2. Add your site. Either import from Google Search Console or verify with the method Bing offers, such as an XML file, a meta tag or a DNS record.
  3. Submit your sitemap if the import did not bring it across, and confirm it lists only canonical, indexable URLs.
  4. Check your robots.txt does not block Bingbot by accident. If you are unsure how it works, my guide to robots.txt explains the syntax.
  5. Set up IndexNow (next section) or enable the feature in your CMS or CDN.
  6. Open the AI Performance report if it is available to your account, and record a baseline.

When I check a new site in Bing, I look first at whether the sitemap was read, then at which important pages are not indexed, then at crawl errors. In my experience the surprises are usually self-inflicted: a staging noindex left on, a security rule that treats an unfamiliar crawler as hostile, or old redirected URLs still sitting in the sitemap.

IndexNow: tell search engines when something changes

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets you notify participating search engines when a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to recrawl. The IndexNow documentation says submitted URLs are shared with the other participating engines, and that you prove ownership by hosting a text file containing your key at your domain root. A single request can carry up to 10,000 URLs through a POST.

The limit matters more than the speed. The documentation is explicit that an HTTP 200 response only indicates the search engine has received your URL, not that the page will be indexed. So IndexNow is a notification, not an indexing command. If a page is thin, duplicated, blocked or low quality, a ping does not change that.

Bing’s own IndexNow page describes it as a free, open-source protocol for controlling how quickly content is discovered, and lists supporters including Microsoft, Yandex, Cloudflare, Wix, Yoast and Rank Math. In practice that means most site owners do not write code at all: if you run WordPress with a major SEO plugin, or a CDN that supports it, you switch it on and check it is working.

Situation Use IndexNow? Reason
News, blog or ecommerce site with frequent updates Yes New, changed and removed URLs are notified quickly instead of waiting for a recrawl
Product pages that go out of stock or are deleted Yes Removal signals reduce stale results
A brochure site that changes twice a year Optional A sitemap is usually enough; IndexNow is low cost if your plugin handles it
You want Google to index faster No I have not verified Google support for IndexNow, so use Search Console and sitemaps for Google

What Microsoft says helps content in AI experiences

Microsoft’s AI Performance announcement lists five areas of guidance: strengthen depth and expertise, improve structure and clarity, support claims with evidence, keep content fresh and accurate, and reduce ambiguity across formats. It also says Bing respects content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported controls.

None of that is exotic, and that is the point. Here is how I translate each into page-level work.

  • Depth and expertise. Name the author, state their experience, and answer the follow-up question a buyer would ask. Thin pages written to hit a keyword are the weakest candidates for citation.
  • Structure and clarity. Use descriptive headings, a direct answer near the top, short paragraphs, lists and tables where they fit. Question-style headings with a short answer beneath are easy for any system to lift cleanly.
  • Evidence. Link to the primary source, give dates, show how you know. My piece on E-E-A-T on-page signals shows what that looks like in practice.
  • Freshness. Update pages that carry prices, rules or product details, and show the update date honestly. Do not change a date without changing the content.
  • Consistency across formats. Make sure the same business name, address, prices and descriptions appear in your text, your structured data and your images’ alt text. Conflicting versions of a fact are a reason for a system to avoid quoting you.

How Bing SEO differs from Google SEO in practice

I try not to exaggerate the differences, because the fundamentals are shared. A crawlable site, helpful content, clear titles, good internal links and honest information work in both. Where I do see practical differences in my day-to-day work, they are mostly operational:

  • Tooling. Bing offers IndexNow and an AI citations report. Google offers its own Search Console reports and, for AI features, a documented position: Google says that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and that no additional special optimisation is required. My posts on Google AI Mode and optimising for AI Overviews go through that.
  • Crawler handling. Different crawlers, different rate limits. Check your firewall and CDN rules for Bingbot, not only Googlebot.
  • Data. Bing’s volume is smaller for most sites, so trends take longer to read. Do not over-interpret a week of numbers.

I would not use any ranking factor claims about Bing that come from forums or older articles. Rely on Microsoft’s published guidance, and test on your own pages.

Measure Bing and Copilot visibility

Treat the AI Performance report as a source of questions, not proof of sales. Microsoft describes it as showing total citations displayed as sources in AI-generated answers, the average number of unique pages cited per day, sample grounding queries (the phrases used to retrieve cited content) and per-URL citation activity over time.

My routine, which you can copy:

  1. Record the baseline: total citations and the top cited pages.
  2. Note which pages are cited and which of your important pages are not.
  3. Compare the grounding queries with the questions on your page; add the missing answers.
  4. Re-check monthly and annotate changes you made, so you can see what moved.
  5. Combine this with manual prompt testing, as described in my guide to tracking brand visibility in AI assistants, because no single report covers every assistant.

Results vary, reports can change while a feature is in preview, and I cannot tell you what a given number of citations is worth to your business. That judgement is yours, informed by enquiries and sales.

A short action plan

If you do nothing else this week: verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, switch on IndexNow through your plugin or CDN, fix anything blocking Bingbot, and rewrite your five most important pages so each begins with a direct answer and a named author. For Perplexity, which has its own retrieval behaviour, see my guide to Perplexity SEO, and for the bigger picture see the generative engine optimisation hub.

If you would like someone to check the technical side, my technical SEO services cover crawl access, sitemaps, indexing and structured data across Google and Bing. You can ask for a free audit through the contact page.

Questions people ask about Bing SEO

Is Bing SEO worth the effort for a small business?

Usually yes, because the setup takes an hour or two and overlaps with Google work. Bing Webmaster Tools also reports citations in Copilot and Bing AI summaries, which is useful visibility data. I would not expect Bing to replace Google as your main traffic source.

Does IndexNow make Bing index my pages faster?

It tells participating engines that a URL changed, which can speed discovery. It does not guarantee indexing. The documentation says a 200 response means only that the URL was received, so the page still has to be worth indexing.

Does ranking in Bing get me cited in ChatGPT?

I cannot verify that. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers but does not say which provider supplies a given answer. Treat Bing visibility as helpful, not as a guarantee.

Do I need a separate sitemap for Bing?

No. The same XML sitemap works. Submit it in Bing Webmaster Tools, or import your site from Google Search Console, which brings sitemaps across.

More AI search guides: start with the generative engine optimization guide, then go deeper: