Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow
Most SEO work fixes on Google and stops there. That leaves value on the table, because the Bing index now feeds a large share of the AI answers people read. Getting into Bing is no longer about Bing's search share alone.
Why Bing matters more than its market share
Judge Bing by its old traffic numbers and you will skip it. Judge it by what it feeds and you will not. Bing powers a large share of the AI answer engines people now use, including ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot. When those tools retrieve and cite sources, they lean on the Bing index. So Bing indexing has become a route into AI visibility, not just a second-place search engine. If you are invisible in Bing, you are handicapping your presence in the AI answers built on top of it. How Bing gates Copilot AI →
This flips the old calculus. For years the advice was to optimize for Google and let Bing follow, because the traffic gap was too wide to justify separate effort. Now the same index that serves Bing's own results also grounds a fast-growing set of AI tools, so the return on being indexed there is no longer just Bing's click share. It is a slice of every answer those engines generate from Bing's data.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free equivalent of Search Console for the Bing index. Much of it will feel familiar. Search Performance reports clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. URL Inspection checks a single URL. Site Explorer browses your indexed URLs, and Sitemaps handles submission. Two features stand out as genuine reasons to open it even if Google is your main focus. The Keyword Research tool reports real Bing query volumes rather than another tool's estimate, and Backlinks comes with its own Disavow. You also get IndexNow controls and a set of prioritized SEO reports.
The prioritized SEO reports are worth a look too: Bing surfaces the issues it thinks matter most for your site, which is a useful second opinion alongside your Google-side audit. Site Explorer lets you walk your indexed URLs the way Bing sees them, so you can spot pages that made it into one index but not the other.
Getting in is quick. Verify ownership through DNS, a file upload, or a meta tag, or skip straight to importing your verified sites and settings from Search Console in a couple of clicks. The import path is the fastest way to stand up Bing coverage once your Google side is already verified, and it carries your sitemaps over so you are not re-entering configuration by hand.
IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol from Microsoft and Yandex that lets you tell participating engines the instant a URL changes. Rather than wait for a crawler to rediscover a page, you ping the engines when you add, update, or delete a URL, and they know to fetch it. Mechanically you host a key file on your domain to prove ownership, then send a POST request listing the changed URLs. The key ties each submission to a site you control, so an engine can trust the ping came from the owner rather than from someone forcing crawls of a site they do not run. Submit a single URL or a batch, and the participating engines learn to fetch just those pages instead of waiting on their normal recrawl schedule.
Set expectations honestly. Google does not consume IndexNow for ranking, so it is not a shortcut into Google's index. Bing and other participating engines do use it, which means IndexNow is a real freshness lever for the Bing side that feeds AI answers. Treat it as a complement to your sitemap, not a replacement: the sitemap describes the whole site, IndexNow signals the specific pages that just changed. For a site that publishes or updates often, that freshness signal shortens the gap between hitting publish and appearing in the indexes that feed AI answers. Sitemaps and IndexNow →
Setting it up
The whole setup is a short sequence. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, then either import your sites from Search Console or verify ownership directly. Submit your XML sitemap so Bing has the canonical list of pages you want indexed. Then add IndexNow so future changes ping the engines the moment you publish.
The AI answer that names your brand often reaches for a page it found through Bing. Indexing in Bing is now part of showing up in answers, not a nice-to-have for a smaller search engine.
IndexNow is easier than it sounds because many content platforms and CDNs support it as a one-click toggle. Cloudflare, for example, can enable IndexNow at the edge so every change propagates without you writing the POST request yourself. Turn it on, confirm your sitemap reads clean, and your Bing coverage will keep pace with your publishing. With Google's tool and Bing's index both covered, the next step is measuring what visitors actually do once they arrive. GA4 fundamentals next →