How to Use Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO

It costs nothing, and setup takes minutes if you already use Google Search Console. The payoff reaches past Bing itself. Yahoo says its results are "generated by an algorithm run by Microsoft Bing", and DuckDuckGo says it largely sources its traditional links from Bing. One console covers all three.

This post covers Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO in the classic sense: rankings, clicks, indexing and links. Bing's index also grounds Microsoft Copilot and other AI answers, and that side has its own playbook. For it, read our full guide to Bing Webmaster Tools for AI indexing.

Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO

Setup has three parts: an account, a verified site, and the right people with the right access.

Pick your property and verification method

1. Sign in at bing.com/webmasters. Bing's getting-started checklist accepts a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
2. Choose the scope. Per Bing's add-a-site help, a property can be a whole domain, such as example.com, or one branch, such as example.com/clothing/. Most sites want the whole domain.
3. Import from Search Console if you use it. Bing lists your verified Google sites, you tick the ones you want, and they arrive already verified. You can import up to 100 sites at a time.
4. Otherwise, verify by hand. Bing offers four methods: automatic DNS verification through Domain Connect, a BingSiteAuth.xml file, a meta tag, or a DNS record. Leaving the file or tag in place afterwards costs nothing.
5. Wait two days. Bing says it usually takes 48 hours to build data for a new site.

Give your team the right access

Add colleagues under User management. Bing's user roles are Read only, Read/Write and Administrator. Only Administrators can add users, and Bing warns that Read/Write users "can also block crawling and indexation." Give agencies Read only unless they need to change settings. Bing also suggests more than one Administrator on company accounts, so access survives when someone leaves.

Then open Settings and switch on Receive Communication. Without it, email alerts about crawl errors and index issues never reach your inbox.

Get Pages Crawled and Indexed

Everything else you do with Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO depends on this step. A page Bing hasn't indexed can't rank, however good it is.

Sitemaps, IndexNow and manual submission

Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps, and add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt as a backup. Bing's July 2025 sitemap post gives four rules:

• Keep each file to 50,000 URLs or fewer.
• Set lastmod to the real time the page content changed, as an ISO 8601 date and time. Don't stamp every URL with the time the file was built.
• Skip changefreq and priority. Bing ignores both.
• Watch the last read date. Bing fetches a new sitemap right away, then "typically at least once per day."

For changes between sitemap reads, use IndexNow. It pings Bing and the other participating engines when a URL is added, updated or deleted. Many platforms send pings already: Bing's IndexNow setup page lists plugins such as Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO, plus Cloudflare's Crawler Hints. The IndexNow tab shows which source is sending.

Manual URL Submission still exists, with a limit of 10,000 URLs per domain per day as of September 2026. But Bing's URL Submission page says it "may be deprecated in the future," and that "repeated manual submissions do not accelerate indexing." Use it for a few urgent pages, not as your system.

Diagnose one URL, then the whole site

When a page won't rank, start with URL Inspection. It returns three cards:

The Live URL tab fetches the page as Bingbot sees it right now. It doesn't follow redirects, so inspect the destination URL on its own.

For the whole site, use Site Explorer. It groups URLs by folder and splits them into Indexed, Error, Warning and Excluded. Its filters answer the questions that matter: which URLs return server errors, which carry a NOINDEX tag, which robots.txt blocks, and which Bing picked but hasn't crawled yet. Test any blocked URL in Bing's Robots.txt Tester or our free robots.txt tester.

If Bingbot hits the site too hard at peak times, use Crawl Control to slow it by the hour instead of blocking it. A crawl-delay line in robots.txt overrides those settings, so remove it first.

Find Keyword Wins in Search Performance

Search Performance shows clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position for your keywords and pages. Two limits matter. Keyword and page detail covers web results only, not chat answers or other verticals. And Bing collects data only from the day you add the site. Bing's June 2025 guide says the report holds up to 16 months, though the help page still says six.

The most profitable use of Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO is a striking-distance pass: find keywords where you already rank on page one or two but win few clicks.

Worked example: Fernway's striking-distance pass

Fernway is a made-up outdoor gear store. Its team downloads three months of keyword data and sorts it in a spreadsheet. The numbers are illustrative.

The rule: keep keywords with an average position between 5 and 15 and at least 3,000 impressions. Three rows pass, with 17,900 impressions and 142 clicks between them.

Fernway plans on a 3% click-through rate once those pages climb and get better titles. That's below the 4.2% its vest page already earns, so it's a cautious guess, not a benchmark. At 3%, the three keywords would bring 282, 156 and 99 clicks, or 537 in total. That's 395 more clicks over the same three months, from pages that already exist.

The fixes come from other reports. The SEO card in URL Inspection flags weak titles and descriptions. Keyword Research supplies the questions each page should answer. Internal links from category pages add weight. Our SERP snippet preview helps you test title length before you publish.

Keyword Research for new pages

Keyword Research takes a root keyword and returns three lists: related keywords, question keywords people actually searched, and newly discovered keywords that became relevant to the root in the last 30 days. You can filter by country, language and device across the last six months. It also shows the top 10 URLs for the root keyword, which tells you what kind of page already wins.

Question keywords make good H2s and FAQ entries. If you'd rather not map them by hand, Rankbox's Answer-Space Research maps the questions buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and scores each one for estimated volume, difficulty and intent. Rankbox then writes source-backed articles on its Business plan, $49.50 a month with a 7-day trial (see pricing). It doesn't connect to Bing Webmaster Tools or send IndexNow pings, and it doesn't track AI citations today.

Fix Technical Issues and Close Link Gaps

Recommendations and Site Scan

These two reports turn Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO into a free site audit. Recommendations checks the pages Bing has indexed and lists issues rated High, Moderate or Low, with up to 50 example URLs each and a CSV of the rest. It refreshes as Bing recrawls, so it makes a good monthly to-do list.

Site Scan is the on-demand version. You pick a scope (the website, one sitemap, or a URL list), a page limit, a crawl depth and a speed. It crawls with the Bingbot user agent and sorts findings into Errors, Warnings and Notices. The monthly quota is set by Bing, and you can store up to five scans. Microsoft says fixing these issues can help your site "not only on Bing but on other search engines as well."

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines explain how to fix most findings. Two rules catch people out. First, robots.txt "controls crawl access, not indexing," so use NOINDEX to keep a page out. Second, use 301 redirects for moves, and 302s only for changes shorter than two days.

Backlinks and the link gap

The Backlinks report shows referring domains, anchor text and linking pages. Bing calls it "a representative set of links," not a full profile, so treat the counts as a sample.

The link gap is the part of Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO that most people miss. Open Backlinks to any site, add up to two competitors, then filter to "Show domains not linking to my site." That list is your outreach shortlist: sites that already link within your niche, just not to you. The Disavow Links tool sits in the same report, for links you believe are spam.

Where the AI Performance Report Fits

AI Performance is the newest report. It launched in public preview in February 2026 and counts how often Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partners cite your pages. A June 2026 update added intents, topics, citation share and period comparison, all still labeled preview as of September 2026.

Keep it apart from the numbers you track when you use Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO. Bing's help page answers "Do citations represent clicks or traffic?" with a flat "No." To read the report and act on it, see our Bing guide for AI search, and our Copilot SEO guide for how Copilot picks sources.

The 45-Minute Monthly Bing Check

Run Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO in a fixed monthly slot, such as the first Monday. Work in this order:

1. Alerts and Recommendations (5 minutes). Open the bell icon, then Recommendations. Note any new High items.
2. Sitemaps (5 minutes). Confirm each sitemap's last read date is recent and shows no errors. Resubmit one only after you fix it.
3. Site Explorer (5 minutes). Check the server error, deadlink and NOINDEX filters. Send anything new on an important page to URL Inspection.
4. Search Performance (10 minutes). Compare this month with last month, then rerun the striking-distance pass on a fresh download.
5. Keyword Research (10 minutes). Check three root keywords. Copy new question keywords into your content plan.
6. Backlinks (5 minutes). Refresh the link gap against your two competitors. Pick three domains to contact.
7. Site Scan (5 minutes). After a large release, scan the sitemap scope and fix Errors before Warnings.

That adds up to 45 minutes. Keep a short log of each month's clicks, indexed pages and fixes, so you can tell which change moved which number. This check doesn't cover AI answers. For those, see our guide to measuring GEO.