Bing Webmaster Tools: sign up, import, index, measure

Why Bing matters for a website that sells

On Google France, “bing webmaster tools” is searched 4,400 times a month and “référencement bing” (Bing SEO) 90 times. Yet most site owners stop at Google. That is a miscalculation: Bing’s index also powers other engines, such as Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, and part of your visitors, often on desktop and at work, search that way.

Our own measurements confirm it. From 1 October 2026 to 19 October 2026, on our selling sites, 52% of visits from a search engine came through Bing and its partners, against 47% through Google. On 4 sites, Bing was ahead of Google. On two PDF guide sites that Google had almost stopped indexing, every search engine visit came from this family: without Bing, those sites would have received no search visitors at all.

The sample is small, because Google Analytics only counts visitors who accept measurement. But the lesson holds: Bing is a second market, often less competitive, that you can open in a few minutes.

Step 1: create your account by importing from Search Console

If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, importing is the fastest route. The official Bing Webmaster blog explains that imported sites are verified automatically, with no manual step, and that it can take up to 48 hours before you see the first traffic data.

1. 1
   Sign in: open Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft or Google account.
2. 2
   Import: choose “Import from Google Search Console”, grant read access and tick the sites to import (up to 100 sites at once).
3. 3
   Sitemaps: the import normally brings over the sitemaps declared with Google. Check them in the Sitemaps menu and add any that are missing.
4. 4
   Without Search Console: add the site manually and verify it with an XML file at the root, a meta tag or a DNS record.
5. 5
   Access: give your agency access from the user settings rather than sharing your password.

Step 2: submit every new page with IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol: when a page is created, updated or deleted, your site notifies the participating engines with a simple call instead of waiting for them to come back. According to IndexNow.org, a submission is shared with every engine that uses the protocol, including Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, Yep and Amazon, and a single request can hold up to 10,000 URLs.

Google is not one of the participating engines: for Google, an up-to-date sitemap and Search Console remain the normal route.

1. 1
   Generate a key: a string of characters you choose (or that the tool generates).
2. 2
   Publish the key: a text file containing it, placed at the root of the site, proves that you are the owner.
3. 3
   Submit the URLs: on every publication or significant update, your site sends the page address with the key. Many CMSs and plugins do this automatically.
4. 4
   Check: the IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools shows the URLs received and any errors.

Step 3: the reports to read every month

Bing Webmaster Tools has a lot of screens. For a website that sells, four are enough:

• Search performance: the queries that show your site, clicks, positions. Compare them with Google Search Console: searches that work on Bing but not on Google point to pages worth strengthening.
• URL inspection: the status of a page in Bing’s index, and the option to request indexing.
• SEO recommendations: technical alerts (missing titles, duplicate descriptions, images without alt text). Triage them: fix first what affects the pages that sell.
• Sitemaps and IndexNow: the number of URLs discovered, and reading errors.

Bing, assistants and AI

AI assistants have become a source of visits in their own right: on our selling sites, 13% of measured visits came from an assistant, ChatGPT in 92% of cases, over the same period. For ChatGPT search, OpenAI documents its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot: a site that blocks it does not appear in its search answers. So check both doors: your presence in Bing, and the access of assistant crawlers in your robots.txt.

The mistakes that cut a site off from Bing

• A robots.txt that blocks bingbot, often inherited from a template or a hosting setting.
• A firewall or CDN that turns away crawlers it does not recognise: the page displays for you, not for Bing.
• A sitemap never declared, or one that lists pages returning errors or redirects.
• Pages mass-produced and almost identical: Bing, like Google, filters out content with no value of its own.
• An account created once and never checked again: security or crawl alerts go unnoticed.