Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow are worth about twenty minutes of your time because Microsoft’s search index feeds Bing, Copilot and, reportedly, parts of other assistants’ web retrieval, and Google’s tools do not cover it. The setup is simple: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (you can import it from Google Search Console), submit your sitemap, and switch on IndexNow so that new and changed pages are announced to participating search engines the moment you publish. It will not guarantee citations, but it removes one common reason a new page stays invisible for weeks.
Most small businesses verify their site in Google Search Console and stop there. That leaves a free channel unattended. Here is what it does, what it does not, and the exact steps.
Why does Bing matter for AI visibility?
Bing powers Microsoft Copilot’s search results, and Microsoft has long licensed its index to other products. OpenAI has stated that ChatGPT search draws on a mix of its own crawling and third-party search providers, and Bing has been widely reported as one of them. We cannot see inside any assistant’s pipeline, and the arrangements change, so treat this as a reason to be present in Bing’s index rather than a promise of a specific outcome. We make a similar caution in our comparison of Google’s AI surfaces: each platform has its own sources and each changes without notice.
The practical argument is lower-risk than it sounds. Being indexed and understood by Bing takes minutes. If it matters for an assistant you care about, you are ready. If it does not, you have lost twenty minutes and gained a second set of search diagnostics.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol, started by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021, that lets a website notify participating search engines when a URL has been created, updated or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to rediscover the change, you send a short ping. Participating engines include Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and others. Google does not use IndexNow as far as we know, so you still rely on Search Console and your sitemap for Google.
The benefit is speed and efficiency of discovery, not ranking. A page that is found quickly can start to be evaluated quickly; a page that is not found cannot be cited at all. For sites that publish regularly, or change prices and availability often, faster discovery is a genuine gain.
Step-by-step setup (about 20 minutes)
1. Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account
Sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. Use an account you control as a business, not a personal one tied to one team member.
2. Add your site
You have two options. The easy one is to import your site from Google Search Console: authorise access and Bing copies the verification and your sitemaps. The manual option is to add the site and verify by DNS record, an XML file or a meta tag. If you use WordPress, many SEO plugins offer a field for the Bing verification code.
3. Submit your sitemap
Check that the sitemap lists only canonical, indexable pages (no redirected URLs, no noindex pages). Submit it in the Sitemaps section. If you imported from Search Console it may already be there.
4. Enable IndexNow
There are three common routes:
- Through your CMS or plugin. Several WordPress SEO plugins include an IndexNow feature that pings automatically on publish and update. This is the lowest-effort option.
- Through your CDN. Some content delivery networks offer IndexNow as a switch in their dashboard.
- Manually or by script. You generate a key (a random string), host it as a text file on your site, and send a request to the IndexNow endpoint with your URL and key. This suits custom sites.
5. Test it
Publish or edit a low-stakes page, then check Bing Webmaster Tools’ URL submission or inspection area to see whether the URL is recognised, and look at your server logs for the bingbot crawler arriving. Expect it to take a short while, not necessarily minutes.
What should you check in Bing Webmaster Tools afterwards?
- Index coverage. Which pages are indexed, and which are excluded and why. Unexpected exclusions (blocked by robots.txt, noindex, duplicate) are the most valuable finds.
- Search performance. Queries, clicks and impressions from Bing. It will be a small share for most European sites, but the questions people ask there are still useful data.
- Crawl information. Errors, slow responses and blocked resources.
- AI-related reports. Microsoft has been adding reporting around how content appears in its AI experiences. Features move quickly, so look at what your account offers rather than relying on a description written today.
Check your robots.txt and security layers first
Nothing helps if the crawler cannot get in. Look at your robots.txt for rules that block bingbot or other search crawlers, and at any firewall or bot-protection service that challenges unknown clients. We have seen sites that proudly submitted sitemaps while their own security layer returned errors to the very crawler they wanted. For the wider question of which bots to allow, read our guide on blocking or allowing AI crawlers, and use the crawlability audit to test access properly.
Note that blocking an AI company’s training crawler is a separate decision from blocking its search crawler, and mixing them up is a common reason sites vanish from answers by accident. Check each bot’s documented name and purpose before you edit rules.
What IndexNow and Bing will not do
- They will not make weak pages rank. Discovery is not endorsement. Thin, duplicated or unhelpful content gets found quickly and ignored just as fast.
- They will not guarantee citations in any assistant. Assistants choose sources by their own rules, and those rules are not published.
- They will not replace Google Search Console. Google remains the larger source of search traffic for most sites, so keep that setup healthy as well.
- They will not fix inconsistent facts. If your site and listings disagree, speed of discovery only spreads the confusion faster.
How do you measure whether it was worth it?
Set a baseline before you start: the number of pages Bing has indexed, and the average delay between publishing and being indexed. Check again four and eight weeks later. Add Bing to your referral reports and watch whether visits from Copilot or other Microsoft surfaces appear, bearing in mind that some assistant traffic arrives without clear referrer data. Where possible, compare against our eight-point GEO audit to confirm your pages are structured so that, once found, they can be quoted.
Who should bother, and who can skip it?
If you publish new pages weekly, run an online shop with changing stock and prices, or sell to audiences where Microsoft products are common (offices, enterprise buyers, older demographics), the setup earns its twenty minutes quickly. If you have a five-page brochure site that changes twice a year, the benefit is smaller, though verification and a sitemap submission are still worth doing once. In every case the order of priorities is the same: a site that can be crawled, pages that answer real questions in plain language, and consistent facts across your listings. Bing and IndexNow are an accelerator for that foundation, not a substitute.
A simple maintenance routine
Once a month, glance at indexing errors and the sitemap status in Bing Webmaster Tools. Whenever you restructure the site or change URLs, resubmit the sitemap and check that IndexNow pings are going out. After a redesign or migration, review crawl errors the same week. The whole routine should take ten minutes, and it keeps a second search ecosystem working in the background while you spend your attention on the content itself.