Bing Webmaster Tools: Setup, Reports and AI Data

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free console for site owners: it shows how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks your pages, lets you submit sitemaps and URLs, and, since February 2026, reports how often your pages are cited in Copilot and other AI answers. If Search Console is your window into Google, this is your window into the index that feeds Bing, Copilot and a good share of ChatGPT’s web answers.

This guide is for owners and marketers who have Search Console running and have never opened the Bing equivalent. It covers setup, the reports worth reading, the AI Performance data, and how the two consoles differ.

On this page

• What is Bing Webmaster Tools?
• How to add and verify your site
• Sitemaps, IndexNow and URL submission
• The reports worth opening every month
• What does the AI Performance report show?
• Why Bing matters for ChatGPT and Copilot
• Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console
• Getting Bing Webmaster Tools working for AI visibility

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is the dashboard where Bing tells you what it knows about your site: which pages it has indexed, which queries show them, what errors its crawler hit, and who links to you. It costs nothing. Bing’s getting started checklist describes it as a free account you can open with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook login.

It matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago for one reason. Bing’s webmaster guidelines were rewritten to cover “Bing search experiences, Copilot, and grounding API results” in the same breath. The same crawl and index decide whether you appear in a blue link and whether an AI answer can cite you. Bing states plainly that its AI experiences “rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search.”

So the console is no longer a courtesy check for a search engine with a small share. It is the only first-party diagnostic you get for one of the main retrieval layers behind AI assistants.

How to add and verify your site

The fastest route is importing from Google Search Console. Bing’s add and verify help page explains the mechanics: you grant Bing read access to your Search Console account, it lists your verified properties with their sitemaps, and the sites you select are added and verified automatically. The limits are specific:

• Up to 100 sites per import. Repeat the import for more.
• A ceiling of 1,000 sites per Bing Webmaster Tools account still applies.
• Bing re-validates ownership periodically through the Search Console link, and any new sitemap it finds there is imported automatically.
• If you revoke that access, you must re-verify by another method.

If you would rather not connect the two accounts, verify manually with one of four methods: Domain Connect (where your registrar supports it), an XML file called BingSiteAuth.xml uploaded to your root, a meta tag pasted at the end of your homepage <head>, or a CNAME record added in DNS. Once verification succeeds you see a green checkmark. A red cross comes with an error message that names the problem.

The flow below shows the whole setup in order. Steps one to three get you data; four and five get you faster, cleaner indexing.

Sitemaps, IndexNow and URL submission

Submit a sitemap first, then turn on IndexNow, then use manual URL submission only for exceptions. That order matches how Bing describes discovery in its guidelines: IndexNow, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and external links, in that sequence.

Sitemaps. Bing accepts XML sitemaps and sitemap index files, Atom 0.3 and 1.0, RSS 2.0, and plain text files with one URL per line. Bing’s June 2025 feature overview says submitted sitemaps are processed “at least once every 24 hours.” The guidelines ask that sitemaps list only canonical URLs, drop deleted or redirected URLs promptly, and carry accurate lastmod values. A sitemap full of redirects is a crawl-waste signal, not a neutral file. Our XML sitemap guide covers the format itself.

IndexNow. This is the push channel. When a URL is added, updated or deleted, you ping one endpoint and every participating engine is told. Bing’s guidelines go further than most documentation: they prefer “streaming submissions” as changes happen over large batches. Most CMSs support it through a plugin or natively. The full protocol, key file and a working script are in our IndexNow guide.

URL submission. Inside the console you can submit individual URLs, and the URL Inspection tool shows indexing status, crawlability, HTTP response and blocked resources for a single address. Treat it as a diagnostic, not a publishing workflow. If you are submitting pages by hand every week, the fix is IndexNow or a sitemap that actually updates.

Before any of this, check one file. The guidelines list “Blocking Bingbot in your robots.txt file” among the things to avoid, and a surprising number of sites block it by accident with a blanket rule written years ago. Our robots.txt guide for AI crawlers shows safe patterns.

The reports worth opening every month

Most of the console is useful once; five reports are worth a monthly look. The June 2025 overview lists a dozen tools, and these are the ones that change decisions:

• Search Performance. Impressions, clicks and average position by page and keyword, with up to 16 months of history. Compare it with Google’s figures for the same pages; big gaps usually mean an indexing problem on one side.
• URL Inspection. Index status, crawl result and blocked resources for one URL. Use it whenever an important page is missing.
• Site Explorer. Your site as Bing has indexed it, folder by folder, with crawl blocks and errors. It is the quickest way to spot a section Bing has ignored.
• Site Scan. An on-demand crawl that flags broken links, duplicate tags and missing metadata. It will not replace a full audit, but it is free and it runs as Bing sees your site.
• Backlinks. Referring domains and anchor text as Bing knows them, which rarely matches Google’s view exactly.

Two more are situational. Crawl Control lets you shape when Bingbot visits, which matters for fragile servers. Keyword Research reports queries from Bing’s own data, useful for sanity-checking volumes you pulled from Google-centric tools.

One warning from Bing itself: “A decline in clicks does not always indicate a loss of visibility.” Content can surface as an impression or a citation in Copilot without anyone clicking. Read Search Performance next to AI Performance, not alone.

What does the AI Performance report show?

It shows where your pages are used as sources in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and “select partner integrations.” Bing announced the report in public preview in February 2026 with three views:

• Total citations. How many times your pages were shown as sources in AI answers during the selected period.
• Grounding queries. The phrases the AI system used when it went looking for content that ended up citing you. Bing notes this is a sample of citation activity, not the full set.
• Page-level citation activity. Citation counts per URL. Bing is careful to say this reflects how often a page is cited, “not page importance, ranking, or placement.”

In June 2026 Bing added four more capabilities, all in preview: Intents (grounding queries grouped into categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational and Local), Topics (related queries clustered into themes), Citation Share and Compare. Citation Share is the one to watch. It is your site’s citations as a percentage of all citations shown for the same grounding query, so it tells you whether you are one source among two or one among twenty.

The diagram below lays out what each part answers.

How to use it in practice: export the grounding queries, group them by the page that was cited, and compare them with the queries that page ranks for in Search Performance. Where the two lists diverge, the AI is using your page for a question you never targeted. That is either a new section to write or proof that a page is doing more work than you thought. Our guide to AI citation tracking tools covers how to join this with third-party prompt tracking, since Bing’s data covers Microsoft surfaces only.

Why Bing matters for ChatGPT and Copilot

Bing’s index is upstream of more AI answers than its search share suggests. Three first-party statements make the case without guesswork:

1. Bing’s guidelines say Copilot and grounding results depend on the same crawl, index and ranking foundation as Bing search.
2. OpenAI’s help article on searching the web with ChatGPT says ChatGPT search “sometimes partners with other search providers,” rewrites your question into targeted queries for them, and lists the Microsoft privacy statement among those providers.
3. Microsoft’s engineering post on grounding at scale describes its grounding layer as “the same infrastructure powering Copilot, ChatGPT, enterprise systems from Nasdaq, and others.”

None of this means ChatGPT is Bing. OpenAI also runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and uses partner content. What it means is simpler: if Bing cannot index a page, you have removed it from one of the pools these assistants draw from. We go deeper on the ChatGPT side in how to rank in ChatGPT search, and on what separates being retrieved from being quoted in retrieval vs citation.

Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console

Run both. They measure different engines, and each has features the other lacks. The table compares the parts people use most, based on each vendor’s documentation.

The last row is the reason to care. Google counts AI Overview and AI Mode appearances inside its normal Performance report, so you cannot isolate them. Bing gives you a separate report with the queries its AI used. For a walkthrough of the Google side, see our Google Search Console guide.

The figure below shows where each console sits in the path from your server to an AI answer.

Getting Bing Webmaster Tools working for AI visibility

Treat the console as a monthly habit, not a one-time verification. A sensible routine:

1. Import from Search Console so sites and sitemaps stay in sync.
2. Confirm Bingbot is allowed in robots.txt and that the sitemap lists only canonical, live URLs.
3. Turn on IndexNow through your CMS or a small script.
4. Each month, compare Bing and Google impressions for your top pages and investigate any page one engine shows and the other does not.
5. Each month, export AI Performance grounding queries and Citation Share, and note which pages earn citations for questions you never targeted.

Bing will not tell you everything. The AI data covers Microsoft surfaces and partners, and grounding queries are a sample. But it is the only first-party report any search engine offers about AI citations, and it costs an afternoon to set up. For the wider picture of how Bing ranks pages, read our Bing SEO guide. If you want the Bing, Copilot and ChatGPT side of your visibility handled as one program, that is what our GEO service does.