Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free equivalent of Google Search Console: it shows you how Bingbot crawls your site, whether your pages are indexed, and lets you submit a sitemap directly. Almost every small business site we see is set up in Google Search Console and nowhere else, which made sense when Bing was a rounding error next to Google's search share. That gap is worth closing now for a reason that has nothing to do with Bing.com's own traffic.
Why Bing's Index Matters More Than Bing.com's Traffic Share
Bing's own share of UK searches is still small next to Google's. But Bing's index doesn't only power Bing.com. Microsoft Copilot's web results run on it, Yahoo Search runs on it under licence, and DuckDuckGo draws on Bing's index for a meaningful share of its own results rather than running an independent crawl at Google's scale. A page that's genuinely invisible to Bingbot is invisible to a wider slice of AI-assisted and privacy-focused search than "check Bing market share" would suggest.
This is also a real, specific check in AuditCrow's free scan: the technical crawlability review reads your robots.txt for both Googlebot and Bingbot rules separately, and flags it plainly if Bing is blocked while Google is allowed in. It's a mistake that happens more often than you'd think, usually from a robots.txt template that only ever mentions Googlebot by name and blocks everything else by accident.
Setting It Up
- Sign in at bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft account (a free one is fine).
- Add your site and verify ownership. Three options: an XML file upload, a meta tag added to your homepage
<head>, or a DNS TXT record, the same three patterns Google Search Console uses. - Import from Google Search Console instead, if you already have GSC set up: Bing Webmaster Tools has a one-click import that pulls in your verified sites and, in most cases, your sitemap and top query data too. This is the fastest route for a site that's already doing GSC properly.
- Submit your sitemap once verified (Sitemaps in the left menu), the same
/sitemap.xmlURL you already submit to Google.
What You Actually Get From It
- A separate crawl and index view. Bingbot's crawl behaviour, timing, and any errors it hits are genuinely independent of what Googlebot reports, so a problem specific to how Bing renders your site (rare, but it happens on heavily JavaScript-dependent pages) only shows up here.
- Backlink data from a different source. Bing Webmaster Tools' Backlinks report draws on Microsoft's own crawl, not Google's, giving a second data point worth a glance if you're ever running a backlink audit.
- A keyword research tool that doesn't need a paid subscription. It's smaller than Google's own paid tools, but it's free and tied to real search data rather than an estimate.
Common Questions
Do I need to do anything differently for Bing SEO versus Google SEO? No. The fundamentals, crawlable pages, a working sitemap, no accidental noindex tags, genuine unique content, are the same for both. Bing Webmaster Tools is about visibility into what's already happening, not a separate set of ranking rules to learn.
Is this worth the five minutes for a tiny local business site? Yes, specifically because it's five minutes. There's no ongoing maintenance beyond an occasional glance, and the downside of skipping it is a silent, permanent blind spot on whether Bing can actually see your site.
Will this help me show up in Copilot or ChatGPT? It can only help for Bing-index-derived surfaces (Copilot, Yahoo, parts of DuckDuckGo), not tools built on entirely separate indexes. See our AI visibility guide for the broader picture of what does and doesn't overlap across AI search tools.
Check the Fundamentals First
Bing Webmaster Tools only tells you what's already true about your site; it doesn't fix a blocked crawler or a missing sitemap on its own. AuditCrow's free scan checks exactly that robots.txt and sitemap groundwork, Bingbot included, so you know what you're walking into before you set up a second webmaster account. See our robots.txt guide and technical SEO checklist for the fundamentals this all rests on.
