How to set up Bing Webmaster Tools, from sitemaps to Copilot citations

Bing matters beyond Bing.com: Microsoft says Copilot grounds its web answers through the Bing search service, so Copilot citations start with Bing's index. This guide covers sign-up and verification, sitemaps, URL Submission versus IndexNow, URL Inspection, the AI Performance report, what Bing means for DuckDuckGo, and what nobody can promise.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free service for checking how Bing crawls (visits and reads), indexes (adds to the library it answers from) and shows your site. People often search for it as "Bing Search Console", borrowing the name of Google's equivalent, but Microsoft's name is Bing Webmaster Tools and it lives at bing.com/webmasters.

As of October 2026, the tools listed in Bing's help center are the ones below. The menu names are Bing's own.

How do you set up Bing Webmaster Tools?

Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools comes down to opening an account, adding and verifying your site, and submitting your sitemap. Bing's getting started checklist says "You can sign up using an existing Microsoft, Google or Facebook account."

1. Open an account at bing.com/webmasters.
2. Add your site by importing it from Google Search Console or typing the URL.
3. Verify ownership (automatic for imported sites).
4. Submit your sitemap and set up IndexNow (both below).
5. Come back in two days. Bing says that once a site is added, "it usually takes 48 hours for our system to generate analytics and data" (Bing).

Import from Google Search Console

Importing from Google Search Console is the fastest route if your site is already verified there. Bing asks for permission to read your Search Console account, lists your verified sites with their sitemaps, and "the selected sites will be added and get automatically verified in Bing Webmaster Tools" (Bing).

What to know before you import, from the same page:

• "A maximum of 100 websites can be imported in one go." Repeat the import for more, up to the limit of 1,000 sites per account.
• Bing re-checks ownership through your Search Console account from time to time, and "any new sitemap found on your Search Console account will also be imported automatically".
• To stop that access, choose Disconnect next to the linked account in the Profile section.
• The import list may show fewer sites than Search Console, because sites already in your Bing account, or URLs Bing normalizes and groups together, are left out.

Verify a site manually

If your site isn't verified in Search Console, verify it in Bing directly. As of October 2026, Bing lists four methods (Bing):

How do you submit a sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools?

You submit a sitemap in the Sitemaps tool by clicking Submit sitemaps and entering the sitemap URL. Bing's Sitemaps help page lists the accepted formats as XML sitemaps, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0, and plain text files with one URL per line. The same page shows sitemaps you submitted, ones imported from Search Console and ones Bing found on its own, each with its last processing date, status and URL count.

You can also point Bing to your sitemap from robots.txt, which Bing's July 31, 2025 guidance recommends doing as well (Bing Webmaster Blog):

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

On a WordPress site, see how to edit robots.txt on WordPress without breaking the rest of the file.

What that July 2025 post says about how Bing reads sitemaps:

• When Bing reads it: Bing "will attempt to fetch it immediately upon submission", then revisits it "typically at least once per day".
• Why lastmod matters: "For AI powered search engines like Bing, freshness signals directly influence how quickly updates are reflected in search results and AI generated answers."
• What lastmod should hold: "the true last modification time of the page content, not the sitemap file itself", in ISO 8601 format with both date and time.
• What Bing ignores: "Optional sitemap tags like changefreq and priority are ignored by Bing".
• Limits: up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap file and 50,000 sitemaps per index file.

A sitemap entry that follows that advice looks like this:

<url>
  <loc>https://www.example.com/pricing</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-10-17T09:30:00+00:00</lastmod>
</url>

To confirm Bing is reading it, check the sitemap's status, last read date and errors in the Sitemaps tool.

URL Submission or IndexNow: which should you use?

Use IndexNow (an open "this page changed" notice that Bing and other participating engines accept; Google doesn't use it) for ongoing changes, and keep URL Submission for the odd urgent URL. That's Bing's own advice: its URL Submission help page labels IndexNow "(Strongly Recommended)" and says URL and Content Submission "may be deprecated in the future as IndexNow adoption expands."

As of October 2026, the same page gives these limits:

Two more lines from that page: quota "applies at the domain level (not subdomains)", and "Repeated manual submissions do not accelerate indexing." Bing also says the quota "is set based on multiple parameters and may be revised over time", so check the remaining quota shown in your own account rather than relying on the headline number.

To submit by hand: sign in, select your verified site, open URL Submission, enter one URL per line and click Submit. Our guide to submitting URLs to Bing step by step covers the API calls, quotas and error messages.

For IndexNow itself (the key file, endpoints, bulk submissions and response codes), our IndexNow guide is the full explainer. To automate it from FreshlyCited, the IndexNow API reference and the recipe to verify a site for IndexNow cover the setup.

If your pages are live but Bing and Google haven't caught up, check which of your URLs Google has indexed before you resubmit anything.

What does the IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools show?

The IndexNow tool in Bing Webmaster Tools shows what your site sent through IndexNow and what Bing did with it. According to Bing's IndexNow help page, it shows:

• URLs Submitted and Sources: how many URLs arrived, and whether they came from your own code or a plugin or platform such as WordPress, Cloudflare, Shopify, Drupal or Joomla.
• IndexNow Insights: submissions over time; View complete report adds counts of URLs submitted, crawled and indexed.
• Submitted URLs list: a near real-time sample of recent submissions. View opens each URL's crawl status, index status and first indexed time, and a Late submission flag marks URLs that Bing indexed through another source, such as a sitemap.
• Important URLs Missed: significant URLs "indexed in the last 7 days but not through IndexNow", a sign that some of your changes aren't being sent.
• Indexing issues: reasons such as Content Quality, No-Index Tag, Robots Disallowed and Not Crawled.

It's the quickest way to confirm your IndexNow setup works end to end. Whether IndexNow helps with Copilot and Bing's AI answers is covered in IndexNow, Bing and AI answers.

How do you check whether Bing has indexed a page?

Use URL Inspection for a single page and Site Explorer for patterns across the site. Bing's URL Inspection help page says that when you inspect a URL, "our system will check its status in Bing Index" and return three cards:

The Live URL tab fetches the page as Bingbot would right now. It doesn't follow redirects; it shows the destination so you can inspect that separately. After fixing a page, you can request indexing from URL Inspection, "based on the availability of URL submission quota".

For whole sections, Site Explorer shows each folder's URLs as Indexed, Error, Warning or Excluded, and filters such as "URLs with NOINDEX tag", "URLs that are robots.txt disallowed" and "URLs selected but not yet crawled".

Without an account, Bing's help page on why a site isn't in the index suggests searching Bing for url: followed by the page address; no result means the page isn't indexed. Its usual causes include crawl errors, robots.txt blocks, a noindex tag, no links pointing to the site, and content below Bing's quality threshold. Our guide to why Bing isn't indexing your site works through each cause in a fix order.

For the Google-side equivalent, see how to submit a URL to Google.

What does the AI Performance report show?

The AI Performance report shows how often your pages are cited as sources in AI-generated answers on Microsoft's surfaces. Microsoft released it as a public preview on February 10, 2026, describing it as insights into how content "appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations" (Bing Webmaster Blog).

The launch post lists five measures:

"Grounding" is the retrieval step behind an AI answer; Microsoft says it "refers to the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response" (Bing Search Blog).

On June 16, 2026, Microsoft added four preview features: Intents and Topics, which classify and group grounding queries; Citation Share, "the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query"; and Compare, which overlays a previous period (Bing Search Blog).

Bing's own caveats, from the AI Performance help page:

• Citations aren't clicks. Asked whether citations represent clicks or traffic, Bing answers "No."
• It's a sample. "The data shown represents a sample of overall citation activity", and very low citation activity may not appear at all.
• It refreshes daily, with a short processing delay, and exports to CSV or Excel.
• Indexing comes first. "As with Bing search, AI Performance reflects only content that is eligible for indexing."

Our AI Performance report guide covers grounding queries, the June 2026 additions and a routine for acting on the data.

Third-party trackers that cover ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features are compared in how to track AI visibility.

Why does Bing matter for Copilot?

Bing matters for Copilot because Microsoft documents that Copilot fetches web information from the Bing search service. Its documentation for Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat (the workplace editions, renamed from Microsoft 365 Copilot) says they "use generated search queries sent to the Bing search service to ground responses in web data" (Microsoft Learn). The AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, and only for content eligible for Bing's index.

The chain is: Bingbot crawls the page, Bing indexes the current version, and only then can Copilot consider it. Other engines draw on other indexes; where AI search gets its sources maps which uses which. If you're tightening robots.txt for AI bots, the AI crawlers guide explains why Bingbot stays allowed: blocking it keeps your pages out of Bing and the Copilot answers built on it.

Bing's July 2025 post is also candid about limits: "no tool can guarantee when or how your content will appear in AI-generated results" (Bing Webmaster Blog).

Does DuckDuckGo have webmaster tools?

No. As of October 2026, DuckDuckGo's help pages describe no webmaster tools, site submission or verification service. What they do say is that Bing supplies most of its classic results. DuckDuckGo's page on where its results come from says it runs its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, but that "more traditional links and images in our search results" are ones "which we largely source from Bing."

Its removal help page makes the same point from the other side: "most traditional search results currently come from Bing", so removal requests go "directly to Bing first." In practice, setting up Bing Webmaster Tools properly is how you look after your DuckDuckGo listings too.

Which other Bing Webmaster Tools features are worth setting up?

Three more tools catch problems sitemaps and IndexNow can't fix:

• robots.txt tester. Enter a URL to see whether it's blocked, by which line and for which user agent, toggling between Bingbot and AdIdxBot (Bing).
• Site Scan. An on-demand audit of your site, a sitemap or a URL list that reports errors, warnings and notices; you can keep up to five scans (Bing).
• Verify Bingbot. User-agent strings are easy to fake. Bing's crawler page says to "use the Verify Bingbot tool" to confirm an IP really belongs to Bing (Bing).

What nobody can promise about Bing, and what you control

Nobody can promise that Bing will index a page, or that Copilot will cite it. Bing's own pages say it "may choose not to index specific URLs if they do not meet its selection criteria" (Bing), and the AI Performance help says citation counts change with user demand, freshness, model updates and partner refresh cycles.

What you control:

Where FreshlyCited fits with Bing Webmaster Tools

FreshlyCited covers the step between publishing a change and the engines hearing about it, and its main job is Google, whose AI Overviews and AI Mode only link to indexed pages. It checks which URLs Google already sees, pushes only the ones Google hasn't indexed, and re-checks on day 1, 3 and 7. Bing is a free extra: for sites you verify by hosting an IndexNow key file, every push of URLs on that site is also sent through IndexNow, shown as "Sent to Bing". It costs no extra credits, there's a per-site off switch, and only URLs on the verified host are sent. ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants use their own crawlers and search partners. We don't submit to them, and we don't claim to.

FreshlyCited doesn't check Bing's index yet. Its index checks cover Google only, so for the Bing side use URL Inspection, the IndexNow report and AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as described above.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools once, then let every real update reach both engines. Check your own pages free to see which ones Google has indexed and, for a site you verify, send your next update to Google and Bing in one step.