# Bing Webmaster Tools: Setup, IndexNow and AI Performance > Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, push changes with IndexNow, and read the AI Performance report that shows when Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages. - Published: 2026-10-07 - Updated: 2026-10-07 - Author: Samy BEN SADOK - Canonical: https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/bing-webmaster-tools --- Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free counterpart to Google Search Console for Bing search, and it is also where Microsoft reports how often Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages. Verification is only the first step. The sitemap, IndexNow and the AI Performance report are where the value is, and the report only helps if you know what its numbers leave out. ## Is Bing Webmaster Tools Worth Setting Up? Yes. Microsoft's [getting-started guide](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/getting-started-checklist-66a806de) describes a free account, and setup fits in one sitting. [Bing's webmaster guidelines](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a) say Bing and Copilot search experiences "rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation", so a page Bing cannot crawl is unlikely to appear in a Copilot web-search citation. We cover the mechanism in [our Copilot SEO guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/copilot-seo). ChatGPT is less clear. [OpenAI's help page](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search) says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and lists Microsoft among the providers whose privacy statements apply. It gives no split, so treat Bing as one input to ChatGPT's AI search results. Whether Bing matters for your site is a data question. Open the Search Performance report, take 90 days of clicks, and compare them with Search Console, the check we describe in [our Bing rank tracker guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/best-bing-rank-tracker). ## How to Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools 1. Sign in at [bing.com/webmasters](https://www.bing.com/webmasters) with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. 2. Click **"Add a site"** and choose between importing from Google Search Console and typing the URL by hand. 3. If you typed it, verify ownership with one of the four methods below. 4. Submit your sitemap, covered in the next section. 5. Wait. Microsoft says it [usually takes 48 hours](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/add-and-verify-site-12184f8b) after you add a site before analytics and data appear.
![Three-step flow in Bing Webmaster Tools: verify and submit a sitemap, notify on change with IndexNow, then read Search Performance and AI Performance.](/blog/bing-webmaster-tools/bing-verify-notify-measure-flow.png)
The three jobs in this guide, and the edge of what the AI report covers.
### Import from Google Search Console If the site is already verified in Search Console, import it. Per [Bing's add-and-verify help](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/add-and-verify-site-12184f8b), Bing brings across the property, your user roles and your sitemaps, after you grant it access to your Search Console account. ### Verify Ownership by Hand Bing offers four methods, and which one you can use depends on what you control.
MethodWhat you doWatch for
DNS auto verificationLog in at your DNS provider when prompted and Bing adds the CNAME for youShown only for DNS providers that adopted the Domain Connect standard and partnered with Bing
CNAME recordAdd Bing's verification code as a CNAME at your domain hostNeeds access to the domain account, not the website
Meta tagPaste the supplied tag at the end of the default page's <head>A template rebuild that rewrites the head can drop the tag
XML fileDownload BingSiteAuth.xml and upload it to the site rootNeeds file access to the root directory
## Submit Your Sitemap and Individual URLs Bing's [Sitemaps tool](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/Sitemaps-3b5cf6ed) accepts XML sitemaps, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0, and plain text files with one URL per line. You can also leave a `Sitemap:` line in robots.txt and let Bing find the file itself. Resubmit one sitemap at a time; Bing does not allow several at once. What belongs inside the file is covered in [our XML sitemap guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/xml-sitemap). For single pages, Bing's [URL Submission help](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b) allows up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day. Bing can set yours lower, and the quota resets daily at midnight UTC. Microsoft now steers people to IndexNow. The same page calls IndexNow "strongly recommended" and says manual URL Submission, the submission APIs and Content Submission remain supported but may be deprecated. Use manual submission for the handful of pages you just fixed, and the next section for everything else. ## IndexNow: Tell Bing What Changed A sitemap tells Bing what exists. [IndexNow](https://www.indexnow.org/documentation) tells it what just changed: you send the URL of a page you added, updated or deleted, and participating engines learn about it without waiting for the next crawl. Setup takes a key, a file and a request: 1. Make a key of 8 to 128 characters, using letters, digits and dashes. 2. Host a UTF-8 text file named `{your-key}.txt` at your site root, containing only the key. 3. Send a request. A single URL is a GET such as `https://www.bing.com/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fnew-page&key=your-key` (the URL must be encoded), and a POST can carry up to 10,000 URLs in one JSON body. An HTTP 200 means the submission was received. You submit to one participating endpoint, and according to the [IndexNow FAQ](https://www.indexnow.org/faq) your submission is "shared across all IndexNow-enabled search engines". The [engine file](https://www.indexnow.org/searchengines.json) the project publishes, read October 7, 2026, names Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is not on it, so a submission gives you nothing you can count on for Google. Keep expectations realistic. A submission is not an indexing order: the engine decides whether to crawl based on its own crawl quota, scheduling and quality signals. Send real changes rather than every build. Check your CMS or CDN before building anything. The [IndexNow FAQ](https://www.indexnow.org/faq) lists WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Drupal, Joomla and others as offering native support or support through plugins, and says Cloudflare has a native integration. We ping IndexNow on every push that changes content on this site, through a GitHub Actions workflow that has run since July 3, 2026, but we have not measured whether it changes how quickly Copilot cites a new page. ## Other Bing Webmaster Tools Reports Worth Opening - **Search Performance:** clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position. Chat responses are one of its traffic sources. Microsoft's [help page](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/search-performance-c680da36) still describes the past six months of data, but [Search Engine Roundtable reported](https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-webmaster-tools-gets-24-months-39906.html) 24 months plus country and device filters on Aug 8, 2025, and the report offered ranges up to 24 months when we opened it on October 7, 2026. - **[URL Inspection](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/url-inspection-55a30305):** index status plus SEO and markup cards, and a Live URL tab that shows what Bingbot sees when it downloads the page. ## The AI Performance Report, View by View AI Performance reports how often Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner AI integrations cite your pages. Microsoft [introduced it on February 10, 2026](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/2/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview/) as a public preview, and its [help page](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/ai-performance-9f8e7d6c) lists those surfaces. When you open the report it is labelled "Microsoft Copilots and Partners". Microsoft does not name the partners, and it lists no ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI surface, so do not read the report as a view of those. A **citation** here means your content was visibly referenced or shown as a source in an AI-generated answer. Each view cuts that one count a different way.
ViewWhat it showsWhat it does not show
Total CitationsHow often your content was cited in the date rangeClicks, traffic, rankings or importance
Average Cited PagesUnique pages cited per day, averaged over the rangeA page's role inside any one answer
PagesCitation counts by URLAuthority or placement
Grounding queriesGrouped phrases the AI used to retrieve your cited content, with countsThe prompts people typed, or why a page was chosen
Read it with the help page's own caveats in mind: - The data is aggregated and sampled, and totals can differ between views. - Very low or infrequent citation activity may not surface, so an empty grounding-queries tab is not a penalty. You can export to CSV and Excel; the help page documents no API for this report. On geotoolbox.ai, the 3-month view ending October 4, 2026 showed 270.8K citations, 48 average cited pages and 1,739 grounding queries. Search Performance over a close window, all sources, showed 698 clicks and 71.5K impressions. The totals differ by a factor of about 390, but they count different things, so this is not a conversion rate and not a traffic report. The citation total also hides a step change. Daily citations ran in the hundreds until early August, then jumped to thousands a day, and the report does not say why.
![Bar chart for geotoolbox.ai comparing 270.8K Copilot and partner citations with 698 Bing clicks over three months.](/blog/bing-webmaster-tools/citations-vs-bing-clicks-scale.png)
One site, two Bing reports on one axis, 3-month views. Citations are not visits, and not necessarily people.
## AI Performance Preview Features Added in June Four preview features turn the flat list of phrases into something you can sort and read: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. Microsoft [announced them on June 16, 2026](https://blogs.bing.com/search/2026/6/New-AI-Visibility-Insights-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Intents-Topics-Citation-Share-Compare/), rolling out in preview globally. **Intents** label each grounding query with a query intent. Microsoft says they are assigned by AI/ML classifiers. **Topics** group related queries into themes. To see which pages sit under a topic, you export the data and filter there. **Citation Share** is the percentage of citations on one grounding query that went to your site, out of all citations across all sites. Microsoft calls it an observational metric, not a ranking or a traffic share. **Compare** overlays an earlier period on the current chart. It shows the change; finding the cause is your job.
![Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance table for geotoolbox.ai with Grounding Query, Intent, Topic, Citations and Citation Share columns.](/blog/bing-webmaster-tools/bing-ai-performance-grounding-queries-geotoolbox.png)
Our own grounding-queries table in Bing Webmaster Tools, 3-month range ending October 4, 2026. The Intent, Topic and Citation Share columns are the June additions.
The labels are imperfect, and Microsoft says so. We saw it on our own rows: "que es claude" is filed under the topic Baby Names and "claude precios" under E-commerce. The August jump and phrasing such as "evaluate AI visibility tracking platforms" fit the batch prompts that AI visibility tools send. geotoolbox is one of those tools, running scheduled prompts through several engines, Copilot among them, for its customers, and we cannot rule out that some of them land here. The report does not show who asked. ## How to Act on AI Performance Data Start with an export of the grounding queries, sorted by intent. They are retrieval wording, the kind of sub-query we describe in [our query fan-out guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/query-fan-out). The gaps are where to look: indexed pages with no citations reported in the selected period, or intents you expected and do not see. If an indexed page is never cited, check its directives first. [Per Bing's guidelines](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a), NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results, and NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. Because the report names no ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google surface, run the cross-checks yourself: 1. Build representative questions from your top grounding queries, ask them in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and note who gets cited. [How ChatGPT search picks sources](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/how-chatgpt-search-works) explains what to look for. 2. For engines the report does not cover, use a tracker. We list the options in our guide to [tracking brand mentions in AI search](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/track-brand-mentions-in-ai-search). ## Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console They do the same basic job for different engines, and you want both. Search Console shows Google's view of your site, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows Bing's, including the Copilot surfaces Google never reports on.
Bing Webmaster ToolsGoogle Search Console
AI reportingAI Performance: citations in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partnersSearch Generative AI performance reports, announced June 3, 2026 and rolled out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026: impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode
Telling the engine about changesIndexNow, plus sitemapsSitemaps and normal crawling; Google is not on the IndexNow engine list
These AI reports measure different things. Bing counts citations, and Google counts impressions in its AI features, so a number from one cannot stand in for the other. ## Troubleshooting: Page Not Indexed on Bing Work through these in order, from the cheapest check to the support ticket. 1. **Check access.** A broad `Disallow` written to keep AI bots out can lock Bingbot out too, so block by user agent, using the list in [our AI crawlers guide](https://geotoolbox.ai/blog/ai-crawlers). Then check any firewall or CDN rule that challenges unknown bots. 2. **Inspect the URL.** URL Inspection shows when Bing discovered, crawled and indexed the page, and the Live URL tab shows what Bingbot sees. If it reports "Discovered but not crawled", that is a known-but-not-indexed state. Fix what you find, then request indexing within your quota. 3. **Escalate to Bing support.** If URL Inspection says the page is indexed but it never appears in results, Webmaster Tools may not show the reason. Sign in and raise a request through [Webmaster Support](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/support), attaching your URL Inspection screenshots. In a [July 31 thread about zero impressions](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-in/answers/questions/5962187/bing-webmaster-tools-shows-my-website-as-indexed-s), a Microsoft Q&A moderator, writing as a fellow user, suggested Bing may not yet have assigned enough trust or quality signals, especially on a new domain with few backlinks. The moderator added that support can see serving and indexing data that Webmaster Tools does not expose. These are community answers, not Microsoft policy. ## What to Do This Week Verify or import the site, submit the sitemap, switch on IndexNow, then give the reports a few weeks of data before you draw conclusions. The tool earns its place as a free check that Bing can reach your pages and as Microsoft's own count of Copilot citations. One check comes before the report: can the crawlers reach you at all? Our free [robots.txt Tester](https://geotoolbox.ai/tools/robots-txt-tester) checks your paths against Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and the other crawlers it lists, and shows the exact line that decided each verdict. For the engines this report does not name, [geotoolbox](https://geotoolbox.ai/features/ai-visibility-tracker) runs your prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google's AI features and Grok on a schedule, and the engine count depends on your plan. Like any tracker, it samples the prompts you choose rather than reporting real queries. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Does anyone still use Bing? Enough that it is worth checking before you decide. Search Performance shows how many clicks Bing sent you, in ranges up to 24 months, and AI Performance shows how often Copilot cited you. ### Is Bing Webmaster Tools free? Yes. Microsoft's getting-started guide describes a free account, and sitemaps, IndexNow and AI Performance all sit inside it. ### What are Google's webmaster tools called now? Google Search Console. Bing Webmaster Tools is the Bing equivalent, and it can import a verified Search Console property. ## Sources - Microsoft Bing - Webmaster Guidelines (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a` - Microsoft Bing - Getting Started Checklist, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/getting-started-checklist-66a806de` - Microsoft Bing - Add and Verify Site, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/add-and-verify-site-12184f8b` - Microsoft Bing - Sitemaps, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/Sitemaps-3b5cf6ed` - Microsoft Bing - URL Submission, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/url-submission-62f2860b` - Microsoft Bing - Search Performance, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/search-performance-c680da36` - Microsoft Bing - URL Inspection, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/url-inspection-55a30305` - Microsoft Bing - Webmaster Support (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/support` - Microsoft Bing - AI Performance, Bing Webmaster Tools Help (read October 7, 2026) - `bing.com/webmasters/help/ai-performance-9f8e7d6c` - Bing Webmaster Blog - Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, Public Preview (February 10, 2026) - `blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/2/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview/` - Bing Search Blog - New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare (June 16, 2026) - `blogs.bing.com/search/2026/6/New-AI-Visibility-Insights-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Intents-Topics-Citation-Share-Compare/` - IndexNow - Documentation (read October 7, 2026) - `indexnow.org/documentation` - IndexNow - FAQ (read October 7, 2026) - `indexnow.org/faq` - IndexNow - Participating search engines file (read October 7, 2026) - `indexnow.org/searchengines.json` - OpenAI Help Center - Searching the web with ChatGPT (read October 7, 2026) - `help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search` - Google Search Central Blog - Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (June 3, 2026; note added August 31, 2026) - `developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports` - Search Engine Roundtable - Bing Webmaster Tools Gets 24 Months Of Data & More (Aug 8, 2025) - `seroundtable.com/bing-webmaster-tools-gets-24-months-39906.html` - Microsoft Q&A - BWT shows my website as indexed successfully, but Bing Search shows no pages or impressions (July 31, 2026) - `learn.microsoft.com/en-in/answers/questions/5962187/bing-webmaster-tools-shows-my-website-as-indexed-s` - geotoolbox - first-party Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance and Search Performance observations for geotoolbox.ai (October 7, 2026) - own data