How to set up Bing Webmaster Tools for a small business website

Bing Webmaster Tools is Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console, and setting it up takes four steps: add and verify your site, submit your sitemap, send new or changed pages by URL, then check what Bing did with them. It is free. Most small businesses never do it, so their Bing coverage is whatever Bing happened to find. We set it up for every site we run, so this is the recipe we follow, including the limits we hit.

Why bother when Google sends most of the traffic

Bing sends a modest share of search traffic on its own. The bigger reason is that Bing's index is widely reported to sit behind other products, ChatGPT search and Copilot among them. We have not verified how heavily any assistant leans on it for a given question, and nobody outside those companies can. What we can say is that a site missing from Bing's index has no chance of being found through it. We cover the wider picture in how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI answers.

Step 1: add the site and verify ownership

Sign in at bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft account and add your site. You can import from Google Search Console, which brings across sites you have already verified, or add it by hand. Bing offers three ways to prove you own the site: an XML file at the root of the site, a meta tag in the page head, or a DNS record.

We use the XML file. Bing gives your account one authentication code, and the file is called BingSiteAuth.xml. The detail that saves time is that the code is account-wide, so the same file works for every site you add under that account. We ship it in the public folder of each site as part of a normal deploy, then press verify. If the file is already live, verification passes straight away. There is no DNS change to wait on.

If you use a site builder that will not let you upload a file to the root, the meta tag or DNS options exist for that reason.

Step 2: submit the sitemap

Submit the full address of your sitemap, usually /sitemap.xml. This is the part people skip, and the one that goes stale quietly. When we audited our own account, the sitemap record for pagecog.com.au had been last fetched in June and still listed 20 URLs. The site had grown well past that. Resubmitting the sitemap fixed it. Look at the last fetched date, not just the word "success".

A sitemap is a list. It does not make Bing crawl quickly. Our write-up on sitemap dates and new posts not being recrawled covers why accurate lastmod dates matter.

Step 3: submit new and changed pages

For new pages, use URL submission. In the tool you can paste addresses by hand. If you have a lot of pages, Bing also has a submission API that takes a batch of URLs for a site.

The limit is the daily quota. Bing sets a URL submission quota for each site, and it varies a great deal. In our account, long-established sites sit around ten thousand a day, while newer ones get 100 to 1,000. pagecog.com.au has 100 a day and 1,900 a month. You can read yours in the tool or from the API before you plan anything.

On a quota of 100, the order matters. We submit in priority order:

1. core pages: home, services, pricing, contact,
2. case studies and project pages,
3. blog posts, newest first.

If a site has 300 pages, that is three days of submissions, not one request. Pages you do not submit are still found through the sitemap and normal crawling. Submission only speeds things along.

Step 4: check what Bing did

This is the step that changed how we work. Submitting a page tells you nothing about whether Bing fetched it. The URL information check for a single address returns the crawl status, the last crawl date and the size Bing recorded.

A worked example from this month. We checked two older posts on our own site and Bing reported both as crawled, with a size of zero. A page that was crawled but recorded as empty is invisible in practice. Both posts had been rebuilt since that crawl, so we resubmitted both on 13 October and will recheck. The point is the check. Without it, we would have assumed they were fine because they appeared in the sitemap.

What to do each week

• Look at the sitemap's last fetched date.
• Submit any new pages within your daily quota.
• Spot check two or three important pages with the URL information check.
• Read the search performance report, which lists queries and impressions from Bing. The volumes are usually small, but they are real data.

What this will not do

Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools does not rank you. It gets the pages in front of the crawler and shows you what happened to them. Ranking still depends on the pages being useful. If you want help with the rest, our SEO service covers the setup and the ongoing checks, and you can see how we price work on the pricing page. To talk about your own site, use get started.

Next in this series: Bing Places for service area businesses, IndexNow explained, and llms.txt, what we know and do not know.