How to set up Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing's search console

Bing has a smaller share of searches than Google, but its index is used well beyond bing.com, including by Microsoft Copilot and by several other search and answer products. If Bing has not crawled or indexed a page, it cannot cite or rank it anywhere that depends on that index.

The tool also shows things Google does not: Bing's own crawl errors, its view of your backlinks, and a site scan that flags common on-page problems. And it supports IndexNow, which lets you notify participating search engines the moment a URL changes.

If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, importing it is the quickest path: Bing reads your verified properties and adds them, along with their sitemaps. Otherwise pick the method that matches your hosting.

After verification, open Sitemaps and submit the full URL of your sitemap, or your sitemap index if you split it by section. Bing reads the index and its child sitemaps. Check back after a day for the discovered URL count and any fetch errors.

Then set up IndexNow. You host a key file at your site root and send changed URLs to the IndexNow endpoint whenever pages are added, updated, or removed. Many hosts and plugins do this automatically; our free IndexNow checker confirms the key file is reachable and correctly formatted.

Search Performance shows clicks, impressions, average position, and queries for Bing, much like Google's performance report. URL Inspection shows whether a specific URL is indexed and when Bingbot last fetched it. Site Explorer and the crawl reports show errors Bing hit while crawling. Bing has also been adding reporting on how content appears in its AI experiences, which is worth checking if AI visibility matters to you.

Compare Bing's indexed count with Google's. A large gap usually points to a crawl or discovery problem on one engine, not a content problem.

Verification fails most often because the meta tag was added to a staging template, the XML file is served with a redirect, or a CDN rule blocks Bingbot. Sitemap fetch errors usually come from the sitemap returning HTML instead of XML, or from robots.txt disallowing the sitemap path. Test the sitemap URL directly before resubmitting.

On Pro and Agency plans SerionFlow reads eligible Bing Webmaster Tools data alongside Search Console for the pages it publishes, and sends IndexNow notifications for changed URLs. It does not replace Bing Webmaster Tools for the rest of your site; you still verify the property yourself.