Bing Webmaster Tools: import your site in two minutes

Most owners set up Google and stop. Bing is worth two minutes more, for a reason that has little to do with Bing’s own traffic.

Why Bing matters now

ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot draw on Bing’s index of the web. If Bing has never stored your pages, those tools have far less to work with when someone asks them who to hire. Getting into Bing is one of the cheapest ways to be findable in AI answers.

Import from Google Search Console

If you have already set up Search Console, you do not have to verify your site again.

1. Open bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft account.
2. On the “My Sites” page, click Import.
3. Sign in to your Google account and click Allow. This lets Bing read the sites and sitemaps you already verified with Google.
4. Choose your site and click Import.

Imported sites are verified automatically. Bing also copies your sitemap.

Check it worked

• Your site shows in the list in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Your sitemap shows under Sitemaps. If it does not, add sitemap.xml by hand.
• Search site:yourdomain.com in Bing. Like Google, a new site may show nothing for the first few days.

Then set up IndexNow

Bing takes changes faster if you tell it about them. IndexNow is the way to do that. You get the key in Bing Webmaster Tools, and a short setup means every page you publish is reported the moment you deploy it. The IndexNow post in this series covers the setup.

What Bing shows you

Bing Webmaster Tools reports which pages are indexed, which search terms bring visitors, and crawl problems. Give it the same weekly look as Search Console during the first month.

This is one of 52 checks in the Business Website Launch Checklist, in the chapter Get Found on Google and Bing.