- Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and since February 2026 it is the only free dashboard from a major search provider that reports how often AI answers cite your pages: total citations, grounding queries, and per-URL counts.
- The index reaches much further than the logo. Bing's index feeds ChatGPT Search, Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and AOL. Statcounter put Bing at 12.06% of US desktop search in July 2026, and that figure counts only bing.com.
- Setup is minutes, not hours. Importing already-verified sites from Google Search Console skips verification completely, up to 100 sites at once.
- Indexing on Bing is a push, not a wait. Most sites get 10,000 URL submissions per day, and one IndexNow ping notifies Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep together. Google has never adopted IndexNow.
- The June 2026 update added Citation Share, your percentage of all citations shown for a given grounding query, plus intent labels, topic clusters, and period-over-period comparison.
- Know the blind spot: the report covers Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partners. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews report nothing back, so you still need your own prompt tracking beside it.
If you came here to decide whether Bing Webmaster Tools is worth an afternoon, here is the short version:
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free dashboard for site owners: it reports your Bing search performance, submits pages for indexing, and, since February 2026, shows how often AI answers cite your content. It matters more than Bing's market share suggests, because that same index feeds ChatGPT Search, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo.
The rest of this guide covers what the tool does, how to set it up in about ten minutes, how to push pages into the index, and how to read the one report no competing engine offers.
What Is Bing Webmaster Tools, and Is It Just Search Console for Bing?
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free service for site owners, and yes, the core of it is the Bing equivalent of Google Search Console: performance data for your queries, control over what gets crawled, and a way to submit pages for indexing. The overlap stops there. Bing bundles in things Google has never shipped, and Google holds back things Bing does not have.
Both tools report only their own engine. Nothing in Google Search Console tells you a single thing about Bing, and nothing in Bing tells you about Google. If you run only one, you are reading half the retrieval picture.
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Google Search Console | |
|---|---|---|
| Covers | Bing, plus every surface built on Bing's index | Google Search only |
| Performance data | Queries, clicks, impressions, average position | Queries, clicks, impressions, average position |
| Indexing push | URL Submission, 10,000 per day for most sites, plus IndexNow | URL Inspection, one URL at a time |
| Keyword research | Built in and free, with volume and trend | Not included |
| Site crawler | Site Scan crawls your site and flags on-page issues | Not included |
| AI citation data | AI Performance report (Copilot, Bing AI summaries, select partners) | None |
| Backlinks | Backlinks report with disavow in the same interface | Links report; disavow lives in a separate tool |
| Cost | Free | Free |
The row that changed everything is the AI citation one, and it is the reason this guide exists. Search Engine Journal's Bing Webmaster Tools guide, still the highest-authority result for this topic, does not mention ChatGPT, Copilot or AI search once. Neither does DreamHost's. The tool moved; the guides did not.
Bing Only Has 12% of US Desktop Search. Why Should I Care?
Because market share measures bing.com, and bing.com is now the smallest thing the Bing index does. The same crawl and the same index sit behind ChatGPT Search, Microsoft Copilot across Edge, Windows and Microsoft 365, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo Search and AOL. Get indexed by Bing and you become retrievable in all of them at once.
Statcounter put Bing at 12.06% of US desktop search in July 2026, against Google's 83.12%. Read as a search engine, that is a distant second place. Read as an index, it is the retrieval layer under a meaningful share of every AI answer your buyers are reading.
The ChatGPT relationship is worth stating precisely, because it gets overstated in both directions. ChatGPT Search does not simply read Bing's results page. It retrieves against Bing's index, and OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, fetches specific pages live during a session to supplement what the index already holds. Practically: Bing indexing is the entry ticket, a fresh crawl is the top-up. The per-engine mechanics sit in ChatGPT Search and Copilot, and the citation strategy is in ChatGPT SEO.
The reframe: stop asking how much traffic Bing sends you. Ask how many AI surfaces cannot see your page because it is missing from Bing's index. Those are two different questions, and only the second one has been getting more expensive.
How Do I Set It Up Without Doing the Whole Verification Dance Again?
You almost certainly do not have to. If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, Bing will import it, verification included, in a couple of clicks. Microsoft has offered this since 2019 and it still works: you can bring across up to 100 sites at once, and the import carries over setup details such as the sitemaps you already submitted to Google.
The path: sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account, choose the Google Search Console import option on the add-site screen, authorize the connection, and pick the properties to bring across. No DNS record, no meta tag, no file upload.
If you would rather verify manually, or the property is not in Search Console, Bing accepts the three usual proofs: an XML file uploaded to your root, a meta tag in your homepage <head>, or a CNAME DNS record. The DNS route is the durable one, because it survives redesigns and platform migrations that quietly drop a meta tag.
Whichever path you take, finish the job in the same sitting: submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps and confirm it parses without errors. An unsubmitted sitemap is the most common reason a site sits half-indexed for months. If you are still building the foundation underneath all of this, how to make an SEO-optimized website covers the structure Bing is crawling in the first place.
My Site Isn't Showing Up on Bing at All. How Do I Get It Indexed?
Getting indexed on Bing is a push operation, which is the main way it differs from Google. Verify the site, submit the sitemap, then submit the specific URLs you care about. Most sites get a quota of 10,000 URL submissions per day, applied to the domain rather than per subdomain, resetting at midnight UTC. For the vast majority of sites, the quota is not the constraint.
Work in this order:
- Submit the sitemap first. It is how Bing discovers everything you did not hand-submit, and how it learns your update frequency.
- Then push priority URLs. Use URL Submission for new money pages, newly published posts, and anything you just materially rewrote.
- Then check the result, do not assume it. URL Inspection tells you whether a specific page is in the index and how Bing rendered it. If the content you care about appears only after JavaScript runs, that is your problem, not a submission problem.
- Then confirm nothing is blocking the crawl. A stray
Disallowor a CDN bot rule will quietly undo all of the above. The full checklist lives in crawler access.
One trap specific to AI visibility: plenty of sites block AI crawlers in robots.txt without checking which ones also gate retrieval for AI answers. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT Search results even when Bing has you indexed. We sorted out which bots to allow and which to refuse in AI crawlers: block or allow, and the chapter version is AI crawlers.
If pages are missing from Google too, the causes usually differ, and why your website isn't showing up on Google works through those separately.
What Is IndexNow, and Does It Actually Do Anything?
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets you notify search engines the moment a URL is published, updated or deleted, instead of waiting to be recrawled. You host a key file on your domain, then ping an endpoint with the changed URLs. It is genuinely useful, and it is also routinely oversold, so here is the honest split.
What it does: one submission propagates to every participating engine. Microsoft Bing and Yandex co-created the protocol, and Seznam, Naver and Yep also participate. Ping once, all of them are notified. Because Bing's index is the retrieval layer for ChatGPT Search and Copilot, a fast recrawl there is also the quickest legitimate route to making an updated page eligible for AI retrieval.
What it does not do: anything for Google. Google ran a test of IndexNow in 2022 and chose not to adopt it. Submitting to IndexNow has zero effect on Google indexing, and any tool implying otherwise is selling you something. For Google, URL Inspection in Search Console remains the manual route.
Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep
One ping reaches all five. Bing and Yandex co-authored the protocol; the others joined the consortium afterwards.
Tested it in 2022, never adopted it. Use URL Inspection in Search Console instead; the Indexing API is limited to job postings and live streams.
Sites that publish or update weekly
News, blogs, ecommerce inventory, documentation. If you ship one page a month, the sitemap alone is fine.
Once, then automatic
Host the key file, wire the ping into your build or CMS publish hook, then stop thinking about it.
Bing Webmaster Tools can also handle IndexNow for you: connect it there and Bing will accept submissions on your behalf without a separate integration. On a modern framework, wiring the ping into the deploy step is a twenty-minute job that pays out on every publish thereafter.
Can I Actually See Whether AI Is Citing My Site?
Yes, for one slice of the AI landscape, and this is the part almost nobody has written about. Microsoft put the AI Performance report into public preview in February 2026. It shows, in Microsoft's own words, how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. It is free, it sits inside the dashboard you just set up, and no other major engine offers anything comparable.
Four metrics carry the report:
Total Citations
The number of times your pages were displayed as sources in AI-generated answers over the selected period.
Average Cited Pages
How many unique pages from your site appear as sources per day, averaged over the range. Breadth, not just volume.
Grounding Queries
The key phrases the AI used when retrieving the content it referenced. Not what the user typed: what the model asked itself.
Page-level Citation Activity
Citation counts for individual URLs, so you can see which specific pages the answers keep pulling from.
Grounding queries are the genuinely new thing here. For two years the standard complaint about AI search was that the questions are invisible: you cannot optimize for a prompt you never see. Bing now hands you the retrieval-side phrasing directly. That is the closest thing to a keyword report AI search has produced, and it belongs in the same workflow as prompt-space research.
In June 2026 Microsoft extended the report with four more layers. Intents classify grounding queries into categories including Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation and Local. Topics cluster related grounding queries into broader themes, organized closer to how AI systems group information than how keyword tools do. Compare overlays a previous time period so you can tie citation movement to a specific content change. And Citation Share, the most strategically useful of the four, is defined by Microsoft as the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query.
Citation Share is the metric to actually manage. Absolute citation counts drift with query volume and tell you very little on their own; share tells you whether you are gaining or losing ground against everyone else answering the same question. It is AI share of voice, measured by the engine itself rather than estimated by a third-party tracker.
Read the caveats before you build a board report on it: Microsoft states that grounding query data represents a sample of overall citation activity, and that the metric is still being refined as more data is processed. Treat direction and share as signal; do not treat the raw counts as a complete census.
The bigger limitation is coverage. This report sees Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partner integrations. It does not report ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Gemini, it does not show brand mentions where you were named without a link, and it does not track competitors by name. Those gaps are exactly why prompt-based tracking still matters: run your buyer questions through each engine on a schedule and log who gets cited. Our free prompt scanner builds that first prompt set, and citation tracking covers the cadence.
Which Reports Are Worth My Time, and Which Ones Can I Skip?
Bing Webmaster Tools has more surface area than most people ever use, and a fair amount of it is situational. Ranked by return on the time it takes to read:
| Report | What it gives you | Worth it? |
|---|---|---|
| AI Performance | Citations, grounding queries, citation share, intents, topics | Start here. Nothing else free does this. |
| Search Performance | Queries, clicks, impressions and position in Bing | Weekly. Your baseline. |
| URL Inspection | Live index status and how Bing rendered a page | Every time a page matters. |
| Sitemaps + URL Submission | Discovery, plus the 10,000-per-day indexing push | Set once, use on every publish. |
| IndexNow | Instant notification across five engines | Set once, then automatic. |
| Site Scan | A free crawler flagging titles, meta, headings, broken links | Monthly. A free mini SEO audit. |
| Keyword Research | Bing volume and trend data, free, no seat limits | Useful second opinion on Google data. |
| Backlinks | Bing's own link graph, with disavow built in | Cross-check against your main tool. |
| Crawl Control | Crawl rate by hour of day | Only for large or bandwidth-strained sites. |
| Robots.txt Tester | Validate rules before they ship | Only when editing robots.txt. |
Two of these quietly beat their paid equivalents. Site Scan is a real crawler that costs nothing and has no URL cap for normal sites. And the Backlinks report is a free second link index worth cross-referencing whenever you run a backlink check or a toxic link audit, because no single provider sees the whole graph.
What Would I Actually Do in the First Hour?
Setup, then measurement, then the one gap the tool cannot cover. In order:
Import from Search Console, skip verification
Two clicks, up to 100 properties, verification carried across. If the site is not in Search Console, use the CNAME DNS record rather than the meta tag, because it survives redesigns and replatforms.
Submit the sitemap and confirm it parses
Do not stop at submission. Come back and check the parse result. A sitemap returning errors is worse than none at all, because you will assume discovery is handled when it is not.
Turn on IndexNow and wire it to your deploy
Connect IndexNow inside Bing Webmaster Tools, then fire the ping from your build or CMS publish hook. From then on, every new and updated page notifies five engines the moment it goes live.
Run Site Scan and fix what blocks retrieval
Prioritize anything stopping a passage from being read cleanly: missing titles, duplicate meta, broken internal links, content that appears only after JavaScript. That last one is the quiet killer, and it is the core of technical GEO.
Read your grounding queries before touching anything else
Open AI Performance and read the phrases the model wrote for itself. Compare them to the headings on your pages. Where a grounding query has no matching self-contained answer on your site, you have found a page to write. That gap analysis is the whole job of GEO content writing, and the format that wins it is answer-first structure.
Baseline Citation Share on the queries you care about
Pick the ten grounding queries closest to your money pages and record your share today. That number, not the citation count, is what you manage month to month. Use Compare to tie any movement back to the content change that caused it.
Cover the engines Bing cannot see
Copilot is one surface. Build a set of 30 to 50 buyer prompts, run them monthly through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and log citations and sentiment. Confirm the models resolve your brand correctly with the entity checker, and fix any disagreement through entity SEO and AI citation building.
Frequently Asked Questions
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free dashboard for site owners. It reports how your pages perform in Bing search, lets you submit sitemaps and URLs for indexing, flags technical problems through Site Scan, and since February 2026 reports how often AI answers cite your pages.
They do the same job for different engines. Both report queries, clicks, impressions and indexing status for their own index. Bing adds free keyword research, a built-in site crawler, and AI citation data that Search Console does not offer. Run both: neither one shows the other engine's data.
In part, yes. ChatGPT Search retrieves against Bing's index, supplemented by OpenAI's own OAI-SearchBot crawling pages live during a session. Being indexed in Bing is what makes your pages retrievable, which is why Bing Webmaster Tools now matters well beyond Bing's own market share.
Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools (importing from Google Search Console skips verification entirely), submit your XML sitemap, then push priority URLs through URL Submission or IndexNow. Most sites get up to 10,000 URL submissions per day, and the quota resets at midnight UTC.
Yes, if you publish or update often. One ping notifies Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep at once, and it is the fastest way to get a changed page recrawled for AI retrieval. Google tested IndexNow in 2022 and never adopted it, so it does nothing for Google indexing.
It is a free dashboard, in public preview since February 2026, showing how often AI answers cite your pages. It reports total citations, average cited pages per day, the grounding queries the AI ran internally, and citation counts for individual URLs on your site.
A grounding query is the search phrase an AI system writes for itself when it needs web content to answer someone. It is not what the person typed. Microsoft defines them as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers.
No. The AI Performance report covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. OpenAI, Perplexity and Google publish no equivalent report, so measuring those still means running your own prompt set on a schedule and logging who gets cited.
The Bottom Line
Bing Webmaster Tools got judged on the wrong number for a decade. Market share was never the point, and in 2026 it is actively misleading: the index behind that 12% is the retrieval layer for ChatGPT Search, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and AOL. Being absent from it removes you from answers that have nothing to do with bing.com.
Then Microsoft did something none of its competitors have done. It opened up the citation data. Grounding queries show you the questions AI asks itself, and Citation Share shows you whether you are winning them. Sampled, limited to one family of surfaces, and still the only free window of its kind into how AI answers get built. Set it up, read the grounding queries, and fix the gaps they expose. For the full system around that work, from crawler access to citation tracking, work through the GEO Playbook.