Bing Webmaster Tools for AI search: the setup most businesses skip

Why Bing matters for AI answers

Microsoft Copilot answers with Bing's index. ChatGPT's web search has been widely reported to draw on Bing's index as well, alongside OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI has not published the full detail, so treat it as likely rather than certain.

The practical consequence: a page Bing has not indexed can be invisible to two of the most used assistants, however well it ranks in Google. For example, a dentist in Leeds might rank first in Google for 'emergency dentist Leeds' but never appear in Copilot's answer because Bing never crawled the page.

Google is a separate world: its AI Overviews and AI Mode use Google's own index. You need both. Bing Webmaster Tools is the only way to see how Microsoft's AI uses your site, and it takes an afternoon to set up.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools in an afternoon

Sign in at bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. The quickest route is to import your sites from Google Search Console, which verifies them without touching DNS or files.

Otherwise verify by adding a meta tag, uploading an XML file or adding a DNS record, the same choices as Google. Pick whichever is easiest for your website platform.

Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps. Check the Site Scan and URL Inspection tools for pages Bing could not fetch. Fixing those errors means Bing can see the same pages Google already knows about.

For example, a bakery in Dublin might import from Search Console, submit its sitemap, and find that its new online ordering page was blocked by a robots.txt rule. A quick fix makes that page eligible for Bing and Copilot.

IndexNow: tell Bing the moment a page changes

IndexNow is an open protocol, started by Microsoft and Yandex, that lets a site ping search engines when a URL is added, changed or removed, instead of waiting to be crawled. Faster discovery means your latest content can appear in AI answers sooner.

Many platforms send IndexNow pings for you, including popular WordPress SEO plugins, Shopify, Wix and some CDNs. Check your platform's settings before building anything.

If nothing does it for you, the key is generated in Bing Webmaster Tools and a ping is one web request per changed URL. For example, a plumber in Manchester who updates prices weekly could set up a simple script to ping IndexNow each time a page changes.

The AI Performance report

In February 2026 Microsoft added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview. It shows when your site is cited as a source in AI-generated answers in Microsoft Copilot, in Bing's own AI summaries, and in what Microsoft calls select partner integrations, which it does not name.

It reports total citations over the chosen period, the daily average number of your pages cited, a sample of the grounding queries the AI used to retrieve your content, citation counts per URL, and a timeline.

Microsoft says the citation count does not show where in the answer you appeared, and the grounding queries are a sample. It is the first first-party view of AI citations from any search engine; Google Search Console folds AI Overviews and AI Mode into its ordinary web totals and does not separate them.

For example, a wedding photographer in Sydney might see that her 'pricing' page is cited often for queries about cost, but her 'about' page never appears. That tells her where to focus.

What to do with it

Compare the grounding queries with the questions you want to be named for. Gaps are pages to write or improve. If a query appears but your page is not cited, that page may need clearer answers.

Watch the URLs cited: they are the pages Bing's AI trusts. Keep them current and make sure they state your name, location and services plainly. For example, a accountant in Toronto might add a clear FAQ section to a cited page to answer common client questions directly.

Bing's report only covers Microsoft's answers. For ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek and Google's AI features, Vasukai asks the questions directly and shows whether you are named and which sites are cited; plans from $19 a month, free check with no card.