Bing Search Console: how to set up Bing Webmaster Tools

What is Bing Search Console?

Bing Search Console is the name people use for Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT), the dashboard Microsoft gives site owners to manage how Bing sees their site. It is the Bing counterpart of Google Search Console. You use it to prove that you own a site, submit sitemaps and individual URLs, inspect how Bing sees a page, read search performance data and, since 2026, see where your content is cited in AI answers.

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools overlap, but they are separate systems with separate data. Bing’s Search Performance report counts impressions and clicks across Bing sources such as web and chat, news, images and videos. If you only look at Google’s data, you are missing the traffic and the signals that come from Bing and from the products built on it.

Why does Bing Webmaster Tools matter for ChatGPT search and Copilot?

Because several AI answer products depend on Bing’s index, at least in part. These are the statements the companies have actually made.

• Microsoft on Copilot: the Bing Webmaster Guidelines say Bing and Copilot search experiences rely on the same core crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search. Microsoft’s documentation adds that Copilot generates a search query that it sends to the Bing search service.
• Microsoft on ChatGPT: a Bing Webmaster Blog post says Bing powers a wide range of AI and search experiences, including AI tools like ChatGPT.
• OpenAI on ChatGPT search: OpenAI’s help page says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and links Microsoft’s privacy statement. It does not say how much of the results come from Bing, and OpenAI tells site owners to allow OAI-SearchBot.

So Bing is a cheap safeguard, not a proven lever. Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools takes minutes, and it gives you Microsoft’s own report on citations in Copilot. For the ChatGPT side of the story, read our guide to SEO for ChatGPT.

How do you set up Bing Webmaster Tools?

1. 1

   Sign in

   Open Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with an existing Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. You can also create a new Microsoft account.

2. 2

   Add your site

   Choose one of two ways: import your sites from Google Search Console, or add the site manually by entering its URL. A property can be a whole domain, such as example.com, or a single branch, such as example.com/clothing/.

3. 3

   Verify ownership

   Imported sites are verified automatically. For a manually added site, choose one of the verification methods described below.

4. 4

   Submit a sitemap and switch on IndexNow

   Both are covered in the next sections. Do them straight away, because they decide how quickly Bing finds your pages.

5. 5

   Wait for data

   Bing says it usually takes about 48 hours before analytics data for a new site appears.

How do you import a site from Google Search Console?

Importing is the fastest route if your site is already verified in Google. Bing’s own import guide lists these steps:

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, open the My Sites page and click Import.
2. Sign in with your Google Search Console account and click Allow. This gives Bing access to your list of verified sites and sitemaps.
3. Bing lists your verified sites with their sitemap counts and your role on each. Select the sites you want and click Import.

Imported sites are verified automatically and their sitemaps are connected. An import brings in up to 100 sites at a time, and the limit of 1,000 sites per Bing Webmaster Tools account still applies. Ownership of an imported site is validated again from time to time through your Google account. If you revoke Bing’s access in Google, reconnect the account or verify the site another way.

How do you verify a site in Bing Webmaster Tools manually?

Bing’s add and verify help page lists four methods. Pick the one you can do fastest.

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="<your-verification-code>" />

Microsoft’s documentation does not say whether you may remove the file, tag or record after verification, so keep it in place. A note on DNS: the help page describes a CNAME record, while a 2025 Bing blog post mentions a TXT record, so follow whatever the verification screen displays for your site.

How do you submit a sitemap to Bing?

Open the Sitemaps tool, click Submit sitemaps at the top right and enter the sitemap URL. Bing accepts XML sitemaps and sitemap index files, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds, and text files with one URL per line. The list shows each sitemap’s last processing date, status and the number of URLs Bing discovered. You can also point Bing to your sitemap in robots.txt.

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Bing’s guidance on sitemaps sets these limits: up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap file, up to 50,000 child sitemaps in an index file, and 50 MB per file uncompressed. Use an accurate lastmod value in ISO 8601 format with date and time. Bing says it ignores changefreq and priority. It fetches a sitemap when you submit it and then typically at least once a day. To check your own file before you submit it, use our free sitemap checker.

What is IndexNow, and should you use it?

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets you tell search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to recrawl. Bing’s URL submission page describes it as automatically notifying Bing and participating search engines, and strongly recommends it. The IndexNow site lists Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporters. Google is not on the list, so keep your sitemap too.

1. 1

   Generate a key

   A key has 8 to 128 characters and may contain a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9 and hyphens.

2. 2

   Host the key file

   Create a UTF-8 text file named after the key, such as <your-key>.txt, at the root of your site. It contains only the key. This is how engines confirm that you own the host.

3. 3

   Submit changed URLs

   Send one URL with a GET request, or up to 10,000 URLs with a POST request. You need to submit to only one endpoint, because participating engines share the URLs with each other.

   curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
     -d '{"host":"www.example.com","key":"<your-key>","urlList":["https://www.example.com/new-page","https://www.example.com/updated-page"]}'

4. 4

   Check the result

   A 200 or 202 response means the submission was received, and a 202 means key validation is pending. A 403 means the key is invalid. Bing shows IndexNow activity under the IndexNow tab in Bing Webmaster Tools.

The IndexNow FAQ is clear about the limits: submitting a URL is not a guarantee that it will be indexed, every URL counts towards crawl quota, and you should wait about five minutes before you resubmit the same URL. Several content management systems and Cloudflare’s Crawler Hints support IndexNow, as Bing’s getting started guide notes.

How do URL submission and URL inspection work?

If you cannot use IndexNow, Bing Webmaster Tools lets you submit URLs by hand. You can submit up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day, the quota resets at midnight UTC, and the last 1,000 submitted URLs stay visible in your history. Bing says that quota is set on several parameters and may be lower for your site, and that these manual methods may be replaced by IndexNow in future.

The URL Inspection tool shows how Bing sees one page through three cards: an Index card (discovered, crawled and indexed, with the HTML and HTTP response and any errors), an SEO card (errors, warnings and notices with fixes) and a Markup card (Microdata, Microformats, Open Graph and JSON-LD found on the page). The Live URL tab sends a request through Bingbot to show what it sees right now, and you can request indexing from there, subject to your URL submission quota.

What do the Search Performance and AI Performance reports show?

Search Performance reports impressions, clicks, average click-through rate and average position. Keywords and pages are listed in tables, you can compare two periods, and you can export to CSV. Microsoft extended the data to 16 months in October 2024.

AI Performance launched in public preview in February 2026. It shows how your content appears in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations, with total citations, average cited pages, a sample of grounding queries and page-level citation activity. Microsoft’s help page is explicit about the limits: citations are not clicks or traffic, the data is sampled, and the report does not measure rankings, authority or importance. A June 2026 update added intents, topics, citation share and a compare view, also in preview.

How do you get a Bing Webmaster API key?

The Webmaster API gives programmatic access to the data in the dashboard. Microsoft’s getting access guide offers two methods: OAuth 2.0, which Microsoft recommends, or an API key. To create a key, sign in, make sure at least one site is verified, click Settings at the top right, open API Access, accept the terms and click API Key, then Generate API Key.

• One key per user. It works for all the sites you have verified. To rotate it, delete the old key and generate a new one.
• Keep it secret. Anyone with the key can read the data of all your verified sites.
• Use the JSON endpoint. Microsoft retired the legacy SOAP and POX APIs on 31 Aug 2026. The JSON methods live under https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/ and answer with the result wrapped in a d property.
• Traffic methods. GetQueryStats and GetPageStats return clicks, impressions and average positions per query or page, and GetUrlInfo returns what Bing knows about one URL.

curl "https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/GetUserSites?apikey=$BING_WEBMASTER_API_KEY"

How does Serpel use Bing Webmaster Tools data?

Serpel reads your Bing Webmaster Tools data with that API key. You paste the key once, and Serpel lists your verified sites and matches each one to a project by domain. It then shows Bing clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position per query and per page, next to Google’s numbers on the Search data page, for 7, 28 or 90 days. Reading the data costs no credits, and Serpel stores the key encrypted.

Two limits are worth knowing. Serpel keeps no history of Bing data and reads it live, so the history you see is whatever Bing returns. And it shows Search Performance numbers only, not the AI Performance report. The same data is available in the CLI and to your coding agent through the get_search_performance tool of the MCP server.

serpel search connect-bing --project <project-id> --api-key-file bing.key
serpel search queries --project <project-id> --provider bing --dimension page --days 90