Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service from Microsoft that shows a website owner how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks their pages. It reports the search queries that led to the site, the pages Bing has stored in its index and the technical problems that stop pages from appearing. It is Microsoft's counterpart to Google Search Console.
The tool matters beyond Bing's own results page. Bing's index is the data source for Microsoft Copilot and is licensed to other search products, including Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT search has drawn on it as one of its indexes. A page Bing cannot find or read has fewer routes into those answers.
How do you set up Bing Webmaster Tools?
A site owner signs in with a Microsoft account and adds the site. Before any data appears, Bing needs proof that the person controls the domain. This step is called verification, and there are several ways to do it:
- Upload an XML file that Bing provides to the root of the site.
- Add a meta tag to the head of the home page.
- Add a CNAME record to the domain's DNS settings.
- Import sites that are already verified in Google Search Console, which copies the verification and can bring sitemaps along.
For sites already set up in Google, the import option is the fastest. After verification, reports begin to fill in over the following days, and historical data starts from the point the site was added.
What does Bing Webmaster Tools report?
The tool is divided into reports, each answering a different question about the site.
| Report | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Search performance | Queries and pages with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position |
| URL inspection | Whether a single URL is indexed, when it was last crawled and any problems found |
| Sitemaps | Submitted sitemap files, how many URLs they list and any errors reading them |
| Site explorer | The site's folders and URLs as Bing sees them, with crawl and index status |
| Backlinks | Other sites that link to the site and the pages they link to |
| Site scan | An on-demand audit for issues such as missing titles, broken links and redirect problems |
| Robots.txt tester | How Bing's crawler interprets the site's robots.txt rules |
An impression is counted when a page appears in a results list a person sees, and a click when they follow the link. Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. Average position is the mean rank of the page across the queries where it showed up.
The tool also includes keyword research, which estimates how often people search for a phrase on Bing. This helps when checking demand, though the numbers describe Bing users only.
How does Bing find and index pages?
Bing's crawler is called Bingbot. It discovers URLs by following links, reading sitemaps and receiving direct notifications. It obeys the rules in robots.txt, so a disallow line for Bingbot keeps those URLs out of the crawl. A crawl control setting in Bing Webmaster Tools lets a site owner ask Bingbot to crawl more slowly during busy hours.
Bing also supports IndexNow, an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL has been added, changed or deleted. The site sends a short request listing the changed URLs as soon as they change, so it does not have to wait for the crawler to come back, and participating search engines share the notification. Many content management systems and plugins send IndexNow pings automatically. The URL submission tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools does the same thing manually for a limited number of URLs per day.
Faster indexing matters for AI search because most AI answers are written from pages retrieved at the moment of the question. A product page updated this morning can only be quoted if the index already holds the new version.
How is it different from Google Search Console?
The two tools cover the same ground for different search engines. Each reports only on its own crawler and its own results, so the queries, impressions and indexing status will not match. A page can be indexed in Google and missing from Bing, or the reverse, because the crawlers run on separate schedules and apply their own quality filters.
There are some practical differences:
- Bing offers the Google import for verification and sitemaps, which Google does not offer in the other direction.
- IndexNow is supported by Bing and not used by Google.
- Backlink data and a site audit are built into Bing's tool, while Google Search Console covers them only partly or not at all.
In most countries Bing has a smaller share of traditional search than Google, so many sites never set it up. That leaves a gap, since the Bing index feeds products that people use for AI answers.
What does Bing Webmaster Tools tell you about AI visibility?
It shows the first condition for appearing in AI answers built on Bing: whether the pages are crawled and indexed. If URL inspection says a page is not indexed, Copilot cannot retrieve it from Bing, and neither can products that rely on Bing results. How AI search chooses which sources to cite explains the retrieval and ranking steps that follow.
The coverage has limits. Answers that mention a brand without linking to it leave no trace in the search performance report, and the tool says nothing about what Google, Perplexity or Claude do with the site. Fetches by AI crawlers such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot show up in server logs, and Bing's reports do not include them. Clicks from AI answers to the site arrive as AI referral traffic and are measured in an analytics tool.
A complete picture combines these sources: Bing and Google webmaster tools for indexing and search queries, server logs for crawler activity, analytics for visits, and repeated prompt tests for mentions inside answers. Searcherries covers the last of these with an AI visibility tracker that runs prompts across AI platforms on a schedule. For a site that has never checked Bing, start by verifying the domain, submitting a sitemap and looking at which important pages the index report lists as missing.
