Part of the SiteMap Series
Your sitemap is now submitted to Google Search Console, monitored by the Sitemaps report, and discoverable by Google directly. The work from the last seven lessons has put your sitemap in front of the world’s largest search engine.
Bing is the next channel that matters, and not for the reasons people usually assume. Bing’s standalone market share is small (around 3 to 4 per cent globally), and it is easy to dismiss the work of submitting to it on that basis. The reason to submit anyway is what Bing’s index feeds. Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT search, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, AOL, and Ecosia all draw on Bing for their search results. In the AI Search era, the assistant pulling answers from Bing’s index might be the only search your reader uses that day. Skipping Bing means skipping all of those downstream channels at once.
This lesson covers why Bing matters more than its standalone share suggests, how to set up Bing Webmaster Tools, the Google Search Console import shortcut that pulls verified properties and sitemaps across in one step, how to verify and submit manually if you skip the import, how to read the Sitemaps report, common Bing-specific issues to watch for, and the other Bing Webmaster Tools features worth knowing about beyond submission.
Why Bing matters more than its market share suggests
Bing’s standalone search traffic is small. Most reporting puts its global share between 3 and 4 per cent in 2026, well behind Google’s roughly 90 per cent. On those numbers alone, submitting to Bing Webmaster Tools looks like an effort for marginal return.
The case for doing it anyway is what runs on top of Bing’s index.
- Microsoft Copilot uses Bing’s index as the foundation for its answer engine. Anyone asking Copilot a question gets results pulled from Bing, not from a separate Microsoft crawler.
- ChatGPT search integrates with Bing for live web results when the assistant needs current information beyond its training data.
- DuckDuckGo does not operate its own primary index. Its results come from Bing, augmented by other sources.
- Yahoo Search and AOL Search are both powered by Bing in their respective markets.
- Ecosia, Brave Search, and other privacy-focused engines rely on Bing as one of their core index partners.
Combined, those channels add up to substantially more reach than Bing’s standalone share suggests. Some estimates put the total Bing-adjacent share at 10 to 15 per cent of all search activity, much of it happening through interfaces that look nothing like a traditional search engine.
For sites positioning around the AI Search era, this matters more than it does for sites optimising purely for organic Google traffic. The crawlers behind those AI assistants do not always have their own dedicated infrastructure. They are often working from existing search indices, and Bing is one of the largest of those.
Getting set up with Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is free and lives at bing.com/webmasters. You can sign in with a Microsoft account, a Google account, or a Facebook account. For the smoothest experience, use the same Google account you use for Google Search Console, because that account enables the import shortcut covered in the next section.
The first time you sign in, the interface gives you two paths: import sites from Google Search Console or add a site manually. Both work. The import is faster if your sites are already verified in GSC, and it copies your existing verified properties, submitted sitemaps, and some historical data across at the same time.
The Bing Webmaster Tools interface looks similar to GSC at a high level (left sidebar, property selector at the top), but the section names and report fields are different. If you have spent time in GSC, you will recognise the structure but find the labels and locations shifted around. That is normal.
How to import sites and sitemaps from Google Search Console
The GSC import is one of the most underused features in Bing Webmaster Tools. It saves real time, and most people skip it because they do not know it exists.
When you sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools for the first time (or click Import from the dashboard later), Bing asks for permission to access your Google Search Console account. You sign in with your GSC Google account, grant Bing read access to your Search Console properties, and Bing pulls in:
- Every site already verified in GSC, with verification status preserved (no separate Bing verification needed for those properties)
- Every sitemap submitted to those properties, with submission status and metadata
- Some historical data, including a slice of URL Inspection results
After the import, your imported sites appear in the Bing Webmaster Tools property selector exactly as they appear in GSC. The sitemaps are visible in the Sitemaps section under each property, with status and last-read date displayed. From this point, Bing treats imported properties exactly the same as properties you would have added and verified manually.
The import does not bring everything across. Backlink data, Bing-specific search performance numbers, and the SEO Reports section are populated by Bing’s own crawler over time, not pulled from Google. So the import gets you set up faster, but Bing-native data still builds up at Bing’s pace.
If your GSC account has properties you do not want imported into Bing, you can deselect them on the import screen. The import is not all-or-nothing.
How to add and verify a property manually
If you cannot import from Google Search Console, or you have a property in Bing that does not exist in GSC, the manual add-and-verify flow is straightforward.
From the dashboard, click Add a site (or the equivalent option in the property selector dropdown). Enter the site URL, and Bing presents the verification options.
Bing supports four verification methods.
- XML file upload: Bing gives you a
BingSiteAuth.xmlfile to download and upload to your domain root. The file’s contents include your verification code. Click Verify once it is in place. - HTML meta tag: Bing gives you a meta tag to add to your homepage’s HTML head. Same principle as Google’s meta tag verification.
- DNS CNAME or TXT record: Add the record Bing provides to your domain’s DNS settings. CNAME is the default Bing prefers; TXT is available as an alternative.
- Domain Connect: If your domain registrar supports Domain Connect (GoDaddy, IONOS, and several others do), Bing can add the DNS record automatically with your permission, skipping the manual DNS step entirely.
For a single subdomain (e.g., blog.example.com), the XML file or meta tag method is usually quickest. For domain-level coverage across all subdomains (the equivalent of GSC’s Domain property), use the DNS method. Domain Connect is the easiest path if your registrar supports it because it handles the DNS record for you.
Verification usually takes a few minutes for DNS-based methods (longer if propagation is slow on your registrar) and is near-instant for the XML file and meta tag methods.
How to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
Once your property is verified, whether by import or manually, the submission itself takes about 30 seconds.
- From the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard, select your property from the dropdown at the top, then click Sitemaps in the left sidebar. The Sitemaps section shows any existing sitemaps for the property (including those imported from GSC), with a button to submit a new one.
- Click Submit sitemap and paste the URL of your sitemap into the field. Bing’s submission field differs from Google’s in one important detail: it expects the full URL (e.g.,
https://example.com/sitemap.xml), not just the path. If you paste only the path, the submission fails. This is the most common gotcha for people coming straight from a Google Search Console workflow. - For sitemap index files, submit the index URL itself (e.g.,
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xmlfor Yoast and Rank Math sites). Bing follows the references inside the index automatically and processes the child sitemaps.
After submission, the sitemap appears in the list with a status indicator. As in Google Search Console, you will usually see Pending briefly, then Success once Bing has fetched and processed it. Errors appear with descriptive messages if the file cannot be fetched or parsed.
Understanding the Sitemaps report in Bing Webmaster Tools
The Bing Sitemaps report mirrors the GSC equivalent at a high level but uses different field names and adds a couple of Bing-specific signals.
Each row in the report shows several columns.
- Sitemap URL: The full URL as submitted.
- Last submitted: When you submitted it (or when it was imported from GSC).
- Last crawled: When Bing last fetched the file. This is the field to watch over time, because it tells you how often Bing is checking the sitemap.
- Status: Success, Pending, Has errors, Could not download, and similar values.
- URLs submitted: The count of URLs Bing found inside the sitemap file.
- URLs indexed: The count of those URLs Bing has actually added to its index.
The URLs submitted versus URLs indexed gap is the field worth paying the closest attention to. Bing tends to be slower than Google at indexing new URLs, particularly for newer sites without an established backlink profile. A submitted count of 500 and an indexed count of 200 is normal for the first few weeks. The gap should narrow over time. If it stays wide for months, that signals a content or trust issue. Bing is not resolving on its own.
The Last crawled date should refresh every few days for active sites. If it stops refreshing for weeks at a time, check whether something has changed in robots.txt, the sitemap URL itself, or the file’s accessibility that might be blocking Bing.
Common Bing-specific issues to watch for
Five things to know about that catch people who are coming from a Google-first workflow.
1. Bing indexes slower than Google
Bing’s crawl frequency is lower than Google’s, and its indexing pipeline takes longer to process new URLs. A page that Google indexes within 24 hours might take Bing a week or more. This is normal. The URLs indexed count in your Sitemaps report should rise over time, just slowly.
If after several weeks Bing has indexed only a fraction of your submitted URLs and the gap is not narrowing, that is when to investigate. The likely causes are thin or duplicate content (Bing’s bar is higher than Google’s), aggressive ad density, or the site being new enough that Bing has not extended much trust yet.
2. Bing is stricter about thin and duplicate content
Bing applies a higher quality bar than Google for what makes it into the index in the first place. Pages that Google indexes and surfaces despite being thin or near-duplicate often do not make it into Bing at all. This is not a sitemap problem, but it shows up in the Sitemaps report as a gap between submitted and indexed counts.
The fix is at the page level, not the sitemap level: improve content depth, consolidate near-duplicates with canonical tags, or remove pages that genuinely should not exist.
3. Bingbot needs its own clear path
Bing’s crawler is Bingbot. It is a separate user agent from Googlebot and respects its own robots.txt rules. A robots.txt file that allows Googlebot but blocks Bingbot will silently keep your URLs out of Bing’s index even after submission succeeds.
Check robots.txt for any User-agent: Bingbot blocks. The most common cause of accidental Bingbot blocks is firewall or CDN settings (Cloudflare, for example) that have bot protection rules treating Bingbot as suspicious traffic.
4. Subdomain handling is different from GSC
In Google Search Console, Domain properties cover all subdomains automatically. In Bing Webmaster Tools, subdomain handling is less seamless: you can verify a root domain with DNS-level verification, but Bing still treats subdomains as separate sites in many reports and submissions. If your site uses subdomains heavily (blog.example.com, shop.example.com), expect to add each one separately for proper visibility.
5. Bing relies more on traditional on-page signals
Bing’s ranking algorithm leans more heavily on traditional on-page signals (exact-match keywords in title tags, headers, and on-page copy) than Google’s does in 2026. This affects what gets indexed and ranked, not whether the sitemap is processed, but it is worth knowing as you decide which URLs deserve a place in the sitemap in the first place.
Other Bing Webmaster Tools features worth using
Submission is the primary task this lesson covers, but Bing Webmaster Tools includes a handful of features that GSC does not, and that earns the time spent.
Site Explorer: A deeper page-level inspection tool that shows how Bing has crawled and rendered individual URLs, including the markup it has extracted. Close in spirit to GSC’s URL Inspection tool but with additional fields.
Backlinks: Bing’s free backlink data is more detailed than what GSC provides. The Backlinks section shows referring domains, anchor text patterns, and target URL distribution at a level that is genuinely useful, particularly for sites without access to a paid backlink tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.
SEO Reports: An automated audit-style report that surfaces on-page issues across your site (missing meta descriptions, short title tags, missing alt text, and so on). Not a replacement for a proper Technical SEO audit, but a useful at-a-glance check.
URL Submission: Manual URL-level submission for individual pages, similar to GSC’s Request indexing feature. Bing’s daily quota is more generous than Google’s (10,000 URLs per day per verified site at time of writing), which is genuinely useful for sites with frequent publishing.
IndexNow integration: A built-in toggle that connects your site to the IndexNow protocol for faster URL-level notifications. The next lesson covers IndexNow in depth, including the Bing Webmaster Tools integration, so leave the toggle alone for now and come back to it after the next lesson.
Where this leaves us
Your sitemap is now submitted to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, which between them give you visibility into how the two largest crawler networks (and the AI assistants and downstream engines that draw from them) are processing your URLs.
Both engines work on a pull model: they fetch your sitemap on their own schedule, follow the links inside, and decide what to do with each URL. That model works, but it is slow when you publish or update a page and want the engines to know about it now rather than at their next routine fetch.
IndexNow is the protocol that solves this. It is a push API rather than a pull-based crawl. You notify the participating engines the moment a URL changes, and the engines visit that URL within minutes rather than waiting for their next crawl cycle. Bing pioneered it. Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and several other engines have signed on. Some AI Search era crawlers also honour IndexNow now. The next lesson covers what IndexNow is, how to set it up, and how to use it without spamming yourself out of trust.
Up next: How to Use IndexNow to Notify Search Engines About New URLs →
This is Module 2: Lesson 8 of The Sitemap Series, a technical SEO series on sitemaps from first principles, built for the AI Search era.