Bing Webmaster Tools Checklist

1. 1The Search Engine Everyone Forgets – And Why It Now Matters More Than Ever
2. 2Before You Begin
3. 3Step 1: Import From Google Search Console – Don't Verify Manually

The Search Engine Everyone Forgets – And Why It Now Matters More Than Ever

This Bing Webmaster Tools checklist covers the seven things worth doing on a site you actually care about. Most local service businesses set up Google Search Console and stop there. That made sense a few years ago. It doesn’t anymore.

Bing powers Microsoft Copilot. When someone asks Copilot a question and the answer cites a website, that citation comes through Bing’s index. So Bing is no longer just “the other search engine” – it’s the pipe that feeds a fast-growing share of AI answers. If you’re not in Bing, you’re not in those answers.

Here’s how big that shift already is. We audited one of our clients, Western Trading Post, a Western collectibles auction house in Wickenburg, Arizona. Over three months Bing showed their site 146,700 times. Only about 2,600 of those impressions could be traced to a keyword – Bing states plainly that keyword data covers web search only, not Chat. In the same period, Microsoft’s AI assistants cited their site 3,400 times.

The great majority of their Bing visibility is coming from surfaces that didn’t exist a few years ago. And every bit of it flows through a Bing Webmaster Tools property that took ten minutes to set up.

The Bing Webmaster Tools checklist below walks through that setup and the ongoing checks, so you can do it yourself or understand exactly what we’re doing when we do it for you.

Before You Begin

Gather the following:

• Access to Google Search Console for the site, with verified status
• Access to the website’s admin panel (WordPress login or equivalent) – needed for IndexNow
• Your sitemap URL, usually yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
• A Microsoft account to sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools

Step 1: Import From Google Search Console – Don’t Verify Manually

Bing gives you two ways to prove you own a site. Import your properties from Google Search Console, or place a verification tag on the site yourself (a meta tag, an XML file, or a DNS record).

Import from Search Console. Every time. This is the single most important item on this checklist, and we have the numbers to prove why.

We manage a fleet of over 200 sites in Bing Webmaster Tools. When we audited verification status across all of them, the split was stark:

Verification method	Sites	Still verified
Imported from Google Search Console	164	164 (100%)
Verified with an on-site tag	39	3 (8%)

Every single site verified by an on-site tag had been verified successfully at some point, then quietly lost it. The reason is simple: the tag lives on the site. Rebuild the site, change the theme, migrate hosts, or hand the site to a new developer, and the tag disappears with it. Bing re-checks on a schedule, finds nothing, and silently flips the property to unverified. Nobody gets an email. The data just stops.

An imported property doesn’t have this problem, because ownership rides on the Google association instead of a file on your server.

To import: In Bing Webmaster Tools, choose Add a site and select the Google Search Console import option. Sign in with the Google account that holds your verified properties, then pick which ones to bring over. There is nothing to install on the site.

One catch worth knowing: the import only works for properties that are verified in Search Console. If verification lapsed on the Google side too, fix that first – otherwise there’s nothing for Bing to import.

Step 2: Submit Your Sitemap

Under Sitemaps, submit your sitemap URL. For most WordPress sites this is yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Then actually check the status. Bing reports each sitemap as Success, Warning, or Error, and errors are common and silent. In our fleet audit we found sites with six of nine sitemaps erroring out and nobody had noticed, because nothing tells you.

• Success – Bing read it and found your URLs
• Warning – readable, but something inside needs attention
• Error – Bing could not use it at all. Fix this; it means pages aren’t being discovered.

Re-check sitemap status monthly. A sitemap that worked last quarter can break after a plugin update.

Step 3: Turn On IndexNow

IndexNow tells Bing the instant you publish or update a page, instead of waiting for a crawl that might take days or weeks.

IndexNow is not a switch inside Bing. This trips people up. Bing shows you the status, but you enable it on your own site. Three ways:

1. Your SEO plugin. Rank Math, Yoast, and All in One SEO all have an IndexNow setting. This is the easiest path for WordPress.
2. Cloudflare. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, enable Crawler Hints in the Cache settings.
3. Manual API key. Generate a key in Bing Webmaster Tools and host the key file at your site’s root.

For any business publishing time-sensitive content – auction listings, job openings, event dates, seasonal service pages – this matters more than it sounds. Western Trading Post posts auction listings with real deadlines. Waiting a week for a crawl means the auction is over before the page ranks.

Bing flags IndexNow as a high-severity recommendation when it’s off. On most audits it’s the only high-severity item on the list.

Step 4: Read the Search Performance Report Correctly

Under Search Performance you’ll see clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position, filterable from 7 days to 24 months.

Do not panic at a low CTR. Western Trading Post shows a 1.07% blended CTR, which looks alarming until you look closer. Their branded queries convert at 28% to 56% from positions 2.6 to 3.6 – excellent. The blended number is low because it’s divided by a huge base of impressions from Chat and other non-web surfaces where clicks work completely differently.

Read the keyword table, not the headline number:

• Which queries bring impressions but zero clicks? Those are usually a title or description problem, not a ranking problem. We found a query sitting at position 3.7 with 58 impressions and not a single click.
• Which queries are branded versus non-branded? Branded traffic is people who already know you. Non-branded traffic is new customers finding you.
• How does this compare to your Search Console numbers? Bing traffic is incremental. It is not traffic you were already getting.

Step 5: Check AI Performance – This Is the New One

AI Performance is Bing’s newest report and there is no equivalent in Google Search Console. It shows how often Microsoft Copilot and partner AI assistants cited your website when answering questions.

Two numbers matter:

• Total citations – how many times AI answers pointed at your site
• Citation share – of all the answers to a given question, what percentage cited you

Then read the grounding queries table, which shows the actual questions people asked. This is where the real insight lives.

For Western Trading Post, the top grounding query was “western trading post upcoming auctions” with an 88.9% citation share – when Copilot answers that question, it is almost always quoting them. But the more interesting entries were the ones that never mention the business name at all: winchester rifle history, turquoise identification chart, types of auctions. Copilot is treating them as a reference source on Western collectibles, not just a place to buy things.

That is exactly what the Content Factory process is supposed to produce, showing up as first-party data instead of a claim.

Watch the trend line, not just the total. Citations can fall as quickly as they rise.

Step 6: Work the Recommendations

Recommendations lists Bing’s own prioritized findings for your site, sorted High, Moderate, and Low severity.

Start with High and work down. Ignore anything that doesn’t apply. If you only ever do one thing on this page, clear the High-severity items – there are rarely more than a couple.

Also run Site Scan at least once to establish a baseline. It crawls your site and reports technical issues. In our client audit we found properties that had been in Bing for years and had never been scanned.

Step 7: Confirm Your Access Level

Under User management, check what role you have on the property.

• Owner – full control
• Read-Write – can submit sitemaps and URLs, which covers everything in this checklist
• Read-Only – can view reports but can’t change anything

Imported client sites usually arrive as Read-Write, which is fine. Read-Only is not – you won’t be able to submit sitemaps or act on recommendations. Fix that before you need it.

The Ongoing Bing Webmaster Tools Checklist

Once setup is done, these are the recurring checks. We run them weekly as part of our Weekly MAA Report:

• Property still verified (this is the one that silently breaks)
• Sitemaps all reporting Success
• IndexNow still active
• Clicks and impressions versus the previous period
• AI citations and citation share, and which direction they’re moving
• New high-severity recommendations
• Queries with impressions but no clicks

Most weeks, a healthy site produces nothing worth reporting. That’s the point. The checklist exists to catch the week when something breaks.

What to Do With Your Findings

• Fix high-severity recommendations first – they’re usually quick and Bing has told you exactly what’s wrong.
• Treat lost verification as urgent. An unverified property collects no data at all, and the gap is unrecoverable.
• Compare your Bing numbers against Search Console. Bing traffic is additional traffic, not a slice of what you already had.
• Report AI citations to the business owner in plain language. “Microsoft’s AI cited your site 3,400 times” lands better than any ranking chart.

Who Needs This

If you’re a contractor or local service business owner and any of these apply, this checklist is for you:

• You have Google Search Console set up but have never looked at Bing.
• You want to know whether AI assistants are recommending your business.
• Your website was rebuilt or migrated in the last two years – your Bing verification has likely lapsed without anyone noticing.
• You publish time-sensitive pages and want them indexed the same day.
• Your agency reports on Google only and has never mentioned Bing.

Conclusion

Bing Webmaster Tools takes about ten minutes to set up properly and most businesses never do it. The traffic it surfaces is incremental – visits you were not getting from Google – and the AI Performance report is currently the only first-party view into whether AI assistants are citing you.

Import from Search Console rather than verifying by hand, submit your sitemap, turn on IndexNow, and check the numbers on a schedule. That’s the whole job.

For how we set this up across every client site, see how we integrate Bing Webmaster Tools for our clients, and the wider Website Audit Checklist. If you’d like us to audit your Bing setup along with the rest of your digital presence, get a Quick Audit here.