What Is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's dashboard that lets a site owner verify a site, submit a sitemap and see how the Bing search engine handles the pages. For a health practice, it is a second, low-effort check on whether search engines can find and read your most important pages. Microsoft's page describes free SEO tools, a site scan and a view of the sites that link to you.

How Bing Webmaster Tools works

Think of it as the Bing version of Google Search Console. You prove you own the site, and then Bing shows you what it sees. The tools Microsoft lists include performance data, a keyword research tool, a backlinks view, an on-demand site scan that crawls your site for technical issues, and reports on errors it found.

Setup is short. You sign in with a Microsoft account and add your site. Then you choose how to verify ownership. Bing supports several methods, including uploading an XML file, adding a meta tag, updating a DNS record or using a domain provider integration. If you already use Google Search Console, there is a shortcut. Bing says you can import your verified sites straight from it. The imported sites are verified automatically, and the sitemaps you submitted to Google come across too. Bing says it can take up to 48 hours to get traffic data for a newly verified site.

One detail is easy to miss. Bing says it periodically re-checks your ownership by syncing with your Google Search Console account. If you later remove that access, you will need to reconnect or verify another way.

The second piece is IndexNow. This is a protocol, meaning a shared rule for how software talks. Your site sends a short message to say that a page was added, updated or deleted, and participating search engines learn about the change sooner than they would by waiting for a crawler to return. The IndexNow site lists support from Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. It does not list Google, so keep using Search Console and a sitemap for Google.

IndexNow has limits. Its FAQ says a submission does not guarantee indexing. A page can still be left out because of crawl limits, thin or duplicate content, a robots.txt block or a noindex tag. The FAQ also recommends using IndexNow and sitemaps together, since the sitemap lists every page and IndexNow flags what changed. For why a page might be left out, see indexing.

A word about what this does not tell you. People often say Bing matters because it feeds one AI tool or another. Some vendors publish which sources they use, and many do not. Without a primary source from the vendor, I treat Bing as its own search engine whose results are used in many places, and I do not claim a specific link. For OpenAI's own crawler, see OAI-SearchBot.

Finally, a sitemap and a verified site only help if the pages are open to crawlers. The settings that block them are covered under AI crawlers.

Example: Bing Webmaster Tools at a health practice

This example is illustrative, not a transcript. A chiropractic group with three locations has Google Search Console running but has not opened a Bing account. The office manager spends about fifteen minutes on setup.

She signs in, chooses the import option and approves access to the group's Search Console account. The site appears as verified and the sitemap comes across. She then checks whether the website platform supports IndexNow. Many site platforms and SEO plugins include a setting for it, so she asks the web developer to turn it on.

Two days later she opens the site scan report. It lists a handful of pages with problems. Two location pages return an error because they were moved during a past redesign and the old addresses were not redirected. One service page is blocked from crawlers by a leftover setting. None of these showed up in her browser, because the pages looked fine to a person.

She sends the list to the developer. The developer redirects the old addresses and removes the block. Over the next few weeks she watches the indexed page count in Bing and compares it with the count in Google. The group used two free dashboards and a short list of fixes.

She also resists one temptation. A vendor had told her that a clean Bing setup would get the group named by a particular chatbot. She asked for the vendor's source. None came. She kept the setup for its own value and did not promise the owners an AI result.

How to check yours in 60 seconds

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in.
2. Look at the My Sites list. Is your site there and marked verified?
3. Open the site and look for the sitemap. Is your sitemap listed and accepted?
4. Compare the number of pages Bing has indexed with the number you expect.
5. Check whether your site platform or SEO plugin has an IndexNow setting turned on.

If any of the five is missing, you have your task list.

What to do about it

1. Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account with a company login, not a personal one, so the account survives staff changes.
2. Add your site by importing it from Google Search Console if you use that, or verify with a meta tag or DNS record.
3. Confirm the sitemap is listed and accepted.
4. Run the site scan and send the findings to your developer, with the most important pages first.
5. Ask your developer or check your SEO plugin for an IndexNow setting, and turn it on.
6. Keep submitting your sitemap in both Search Console and Bing, since IndexNow flags changes and the sitemap lists everything.
7. Make your practice name, address, phone and category match across your site and listings. See NAP consistency.
8. Check the dashboard each quarter and after any redesign.
9. Do not make claims to staff or owners about which AI tool uses Bing unless the tool's vendor has said so in writing.