For the better part of two decades, "SEO" effectively meant "Google SEO." Bing was the search engine your uncle used by accident. Then Microsoft wired an AI assistant into Windows, Edge, and Office — and built its web answers on top of Bing's index. Suddenly the search engine everyone ignored decides whether millions of Copilot users ever hear your name.
That neglect is your opportunity. Your competitors have teams tuning their Google presence. Almost none of them have spent an hour on Bing. This post covers what that hour (or three) should look like.
Why does Bing suddenly matter for AI visibility?
Because Microsoft Copilot retrieves web content through Bing. When Copilot answers a question that needs current information — "best accounting software for restaurants," "how much does a kitchen remodel cost" — it searches Bing's index, reads the results, and composes an answer with citations. If Bing hasn't indexed your page, Copilot cannot read it, quote it, or link to it. Full stop.
Bing's reach extends beyond Copilot, too. ChatGPT's web browsing has historically leaned on Bing's index, so pages invisible to Bing can be invisible to more than one answer engine. The mechanics are the same pattern we describe in how AI answer engines work: a language model plus a retrieval layer, and the retrieval layer decides who gets considered at all.
How big is Copilot's reach, really?
Bigger than Bing's old market share suggests, because Copilot doesn't wait for people to visit a search engine — it comes pre-installed in the tools they already use:
- Windows: Copilot ships built into Windows 11, reachable from the taskbar on hundreds of millions of machines.
- Edge: the default browser on every Windows PC has Copilot in its sidebar, one click from any web page.
- Microsoft 365: enterprises pay for Copilot inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams — which means business buyers researching vendors, software, and services are often asking Copilot, not Google.
That last point matters most if you sell to businesses. The person evaluating your product category may never leave Outlook to do it. Their research runs through Bing whether they know it or not.
How do I set up Bing Webmaster Tools?
Go to Bing Webmaster Tools (Microsoft's free equivalent of Google Search Console), sign in with a Microsoft account, and add your site. The fastest path: if you already use Google Search Console, Bing offers a one-click import that pulls in your verified sites and sitemaps, so setup takes minutes instead of an afternoon. Otherwise you verify ownership the usual ways — a DNS record, an XML file upload, or a meta tag.
Once verified, do three things:
- Submit your XML sitemap. Don't assume Bing found it. Bing crawls the web less aggressively than Google, so an explicit sitemap submission meaningfully speeds up discovery.
- Run the Site Scan. Bing's built-in audit flags crawl errors, missing descriptions, and broken pages. It's a free technical audit — read it.
- Check the index coverage. Search site:yourdomain.com on Bing itself. Many site owners are shocked to find half their pages missing. Every missing page is a page Copilot can never cite.
What is IndexNow and why should I use it?
IndexNow is an open protocol, championed by Microsoft, that lets your site push new and updated URLs to search engines instantly instead of waiting to be crawled. You host a small key file at your site root, then ping an endpoint whenever content changes. Bing supports it natively; Google does not.
For AEO this is a quiet superpower. Answer engines favor current information, and Bing's slower crawl cadence means new pages can sit undiscovered for weeks. IndexNow collapses that lag to minutes. If you're on WordPress, plugins handle it; Cloudflare and several other platforms can send IndexNow pings automatically; on a custom stack it's a few lines of code. Pair it with a genuine update habit — answer engines reward pages that stay current.
Is Bingbot even allowed on your site?
Check before you optimize anything. Bingbot is Bing's crawler, and it's a common casualty of copy-pasted robots.txt files and overzealous bot-blocking rules in firewalls and CDNs. If Bingbot is blocked or rate-limited into uselessness, nothing else in this post matters.
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm nothing disallows bingbot, then check your CDN or security layer's bot settings for anything that challenges or blocks it. The same audit logic applies to AI crawlers generally — our guide to AI crawlers and robots.txt walks through the full checklist.
How is ranking on Bing different from Google?
Directionally, Bing rewards being literal and explicit where Google has grown better at inferring meaning:
- Exact keywords carry more weight. Bing leans harder on the actual words in your titles, headings, and URLs. If the page is about emergency plumbing in Denver, say "emergency plumbing in Denver" — don't make the engine infer it.
- Clean, straightforward HTML helps. Bing is generally less forgiving of JavaScript-heavy pages that only assemble their content in the browser. Server-rendered content is the safe bet — the same issue that trips up AI crawlers, as we detail in JavaScript rendering and AI crawlers.
- Explicit signals beat implicit ones. Schema markup, descriptive meta tags, submitted sitemaps, IndexNow pings — Bing responds well to sites that state plainly what they are.
- Established domains do well. Bing tends to favor sites with age and consistent authority, so patient, steady publishing pays off.
The good news: none of this conflicts with Google optimization. It's the same fundamentals executed more explicitly — which, not coincidentally, is also a fair one-line summary of what answer engine optimization asks of a site.
Why is Bing the cheapest win in AEO?
Because effort follows attention, and nobody's attention is on Bing. Competitive queries on Google have a decade of accumulated optimization behind them. The same queries on Bing often don't. A well-structured page with an explicit title, submitted sitemap, and IndexNow pings can earn Bing visibility — and therefore Copilot eligibility — that would take far longer to win on Google.
The entire setup is a few hours of one-time work: verify in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, fix what Site Scan flags, unblock Bingbot, wire up IndexNow. It's the kind of item we routinely find undone when auditing sites — and one of the first things we fix in remediation, because the effort-to-impact ratio is hard to beat.
Frequently asked questions
Does ranking well on Google automatically mean I rank well on Bing?
No. The indexes are built and crawled independently, and pages that rank on Google are sometimes missing from Bing entirely — especially newer pages on sites that never submitted a sitemap to Bing. Verify with a site: search on Bing rather than assuming.
Do I need separate content for Bing and Copilot?
No. One well-structured page serves both engines and both audiences. The Bing-specific work is technical — verification, sitemaps, IndexNow, crawler access — not a parallel content strategy.
Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?
Yes, completely, just like Google Search Console. If you have a Google Search Console account, the import feature makes setup nearly instant.
How do I know if Copilot is actually citing me?
Ask Copilot the questions your customers ask and see whose sources appear, and watch your analytics for referral traffic from Copilot and Bing. Our guide on how to track AI citations covers a repeatable process.
Claim the win before your competitors notice
Bing optimization is rare in exactly the way that makes it valuable: high leverage, low competition, mostly one-time setup. Whether your site is even visible to Bingbot — and therefore to Copilot's enormous built-in audience — is a checkable fact, not a mystery. Run our free AEO audit and we'll show you where you stand across Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest, and exactly what to fix first.