How to Use Bing Webmaster Tools (Setup, IndexNow & AI Reports)

Setting up a Bing Webmaster Tools account comes with many benefits. It helps bridge the gap between you and Bing, providing valuable insights into how your site performs in search results. More importantly, it’s the only direct channel to communicate with Bing and optimize your site for better visibility.

In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up Bing Webmaster Tools, get your pages indexed faster with IndexNow, and use its reports, including the new AI Performance report that shows when Microsoft Copilot cites your pages.

What Is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is the equivalent of Google Search Console, often referred to as Bing Console. It’s a free platform provided by Microsoft that helps website owners monitor and manage their site’s presence in Bing search results.

Just like Google Search Console, it offers essential tools to improve your SEO, track performance, and troubleshoot any issues that might prevent your site from ranking well on Bing.

Why Use Bing Webmaster Tools?

There is a lot of information in Bing webmaster tools, but as a beginner, you should expect the following:

• To receive important messages or warnings about the healthiness of your website (e.g., malware)
• To find out how many pages are indexed by Bing
• To find out how many links are pointing to your site
• To troubleshoot crawler access issues
• To see detailed information on what keywords your site is associated with and your position in the search results. This is especially important for SEO purposes.
• To see how often your pages are cited as sources in AI-generated answers on Bing and Copilot.

How To Add and Verify Your Website With Bing

There are two ways to add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, importing it is the fastest route. Otherwise, add it manually.

Step 1: Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and click SIGN UP.

Step 2: You can create a Bing webmaster account using your Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. Select your preferred method and proceed to the next step.

Option 1: Import Your Site From Google Search Console

On the welcome screen, choose Import from Google Search Console, sign in to your Google account, and give Bing view-only access. Then select the sites you want to add and click Import.

This option has three advantages:

• No site verification is required, because Bing relies on your Search Console verification.
• The sitemaps you submitted to Google are imported too.
• Bing keeps your sitemaps updated by checking Search Console periodically.

Bing only imports your list of verified sites and their sitemaps. It does not import any of your Search Console performance data.

Option 2: Add Your Site Manually

Step 3: Enter your website URL and click ADD.

Step 4: Verify your website. You can verify your site ownership with Bing using one of these methods:

1. XML file: Download the BingSiteAuth.xml file and upload it to the root folder of your site.
2. Meta tag: Add the meta tag Bing gives you to the head section of your homepage.
3. DNS auto verification: Sign in to your domain provider from within Bing Webmaster Tools, and Bing adds the CNAME record for you (this works with providers that support the Domain Connect standard).
4. CNAME record: Add the CNAME record to your DNS yourself.

If you use the XML file method, keep the file in your root folder all the time. Do not delete it after verification.

On WordPress, the easiest method is the meta tag. SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and Rank Math have a field for the Bing verification code, so you don’t need to edit your theme.

Step 5: Submit your XML sitemap. Go to Sitemaps from the left menu, click Submit sitemap, and enter the full URL of your sitemap. Bing accepts XML sitemaps, RSS 2.0, mRSS, Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds, and text files.

How to Manually Submit a URL to Bing

Bing encourages webmasters to use the submit URL feature to notify them about new content, which can speed up the crawling and indexing process.

All major search engines have this feature, but Bing, in particular, wants webmasters to use it, especially for news websites or changes made to existing content.

• Click on URL Submission from the left menu.
• Click Submit URLs
• Enter the URLs you want to submit to Bing and click SUBMIT.

Bing gives each site a daily submission quota, and the tool shows how many URLs you can still submit today above the submission box.

For sites that publish or update content often, submitting URLs by hand doesn’t scale. That is what IndexNow is for.

How to Use IndexNow With Bing

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets your website notify search engines automatically whenever a page is added, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for Bingbot to discover changes, your site pings Bing (and the other search engines that support IndexNow) the moment something changes.

Bing Webmaster Tools suggests the easiest setup for your platform:

• WordPress: Install the official IndexNow plugin from the Bing Webmaster Tools team, and IndexNow is enabled for you.
• Cloudflare: Turn on Crawler Hints in your Cloudflare dashboard, and your site starts submitting to IndexNow.
• Other sites: Follow the four-step setup on the IndexNow page in Bing Webmaster Tools to generate a key and call the API.

Once it is running, the IndexNow Insights report shows how many submitted URLs Bing crawled and indexed, and how long it took. For more on how IndexNow works across search engines, see our webmaster tools guide.

How to Review Bing SEO Recommendations

The SEO Reports give recommendations related to Bing's Best SEO Practices. You should follow and fix the recommendations to increase your website’s exposure in Bing organic results.

You can access the report by visiting "Recommendations" from the left menu.

How To View Backlinks To Your Website Or Any Website

One of the unique features of Bing Webmaster tools is the backlinks report. Besides getting details for your backlinks, you can view and compare backlinks for any website.

Click "Backlinks" from the left menu and then "Backlinks To Any Site".

Click the "+" button to add one or more websites and get information on their backlinks.

How To Perform Keyword Research With Bing

Bing also has a keyword research tool. This tool is useful if you want to know how many times a keyword is searched on Bing.

It doesn’t have all the features of Google Keyword Planner or other keyword research tools, but it is still the place to find out what search terms are entered in the Bing Search Box.

You can access the tool by clicking "Keyword Research" from the left menu.

How To Analyze Your Bing Search Traffic

The "Search Performance" report shows the amount of traffic your website received from Bing (and Yahoo) and for which keywords, with clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. It does not include Microsoft Copilot or other AI answers powered by Bing. Those appear in a separate report, AI Performance.

How to See When Copilot Cites Your Pages (AI Performance)

Bing Webmaster Tools is one of the first webmaster tools to report on AI search. The AI Performance report shows how often your pages appear as sources in AI-generated answers from Bing and Microsoft Copilot.

The report shows:

• Total Citations: how many times your site was shown as a source in AI-generated answers during the selected period.
• Cited Pages: which of your pages were cited, and the average number of unique pages cited per day.
• Grounding Queries: the queries the AI used to find and ground its answers in your content.

Use it alongside Search Performance. A page with few clicks from Bing search can still be a regular source for Copilot, and the grounding queries show you which topics AI answers already trust you on. To get cited more often, follow the steps in our AI SEO tutorial, or let us do it for you with our AI SEO services.

Other Bing Webmaster Tools Features

While the features mentioned above are essential for getting started, Bing Webmaster Tools offers several other useful options:

Crawl Control – Adjust how often Bing crawls your website to balance server load and ensure timely updates.

Block URLs – Prevent specific URLs from being crawled or indexed by BingBot.

Site Explorer – Provides a detailed view of your website’s structure, allowing you to inspect and manage your pages and folders.

Site Scan – Run a site audit to detect SEO issues, broken links, and other technical problems that need fixing.

Robots.txt Tester – Test your robots.txt file to ensure BingBot is allowed to access the right sections of your site.

Verify BingBot – Confirm whether a crawling request is genuinely from BingBot and not a malicious bot impersonation.

Copilot – Ask questions about your site in plain language, such as how to submit a sitemap or what the recent trends in your traffic are.

FAQ

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes. Bing Webmaster Tools is completely free. You only need a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account to sign up.

Is it worth setting up Bing Webmaster Tools?

Yes. Bing is the second most used search engine, with a 4.55% global market share in August 2026 according to StatCounter, and 8.91% on desktop. Bing’s index also powers Yahoo search and Microsoft Copilot, so the same setup helps you in all three. It takes a few minutes, especially if you import your site from Google Search Console.

Is Bing Webmaster Tools the same as Google Search Console?

No, but they do similar jobs. Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s equivalent of Google Search Console. It also has tools Search Console doesn’t, such as backlink data for any website, a keyword research tool, and the AI Performance report.

Next Steps

Bing Webmaster Tools has all the features you need to optimize your website for Bing SEO, and with the AI Performance report, it also tells you how your content performs in AI answers. It is simple and easy to use.

My recommendation is to import your site from Google Search Console, turn on IndexNow, and review the Recommendations report. Then, once in a while, go back and check for errors and look at which pages Copilot cites.