Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow: setup guide for Bing and Copilot

Why does Bing matter beyond Bing.com?

Bing's index is used by more than the Bing search page. Microsoft documents that Copilot answers questions from the web by turning your prompt into a search query, sending it to Bing and building the answer from what Bing returns. Its Copilot web search documentation describes this grounding step.

So if Bing has not crawled or indexed a page, Copilot is unlikely to cite it. Bing's own AI Performance report (covered below) counts citations in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.

For a small business this is a cheap win. Setup takes less time than most other SEO tasks, and the same work supports both classic search and AI answers. If AI visibility is your main goal, our guide on how to get recommended by ChatGPT covers the content side.

How do you add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Sign in at bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. You then have two ways to add a site.

• What you need

  Import from Google Search Console

  A verified Search Console property

  Add manually

  Access to your DNS, site files or homepage code

• What comes over

  Import from Google Search Console

  Your verified sites and their sitemaps

  Add manually

  Nothing; you add the sitemap yourself

• Verification

  Import from Google Search Console

  Automatic

  Add manually

  XML file, meta tag or CNAME record

• Good to know

  Import from Google Search Console

  Bing re-checks ownership through Search Console; revoke access and you must verify another way

  Add manually

  Leave the file, tag or record in place after verifying

Import is the fastest route if you have already done your Google Search Console setup. On the My Sites page choose Import, sign in to Google, allow access, then pick the sites. Bing documents a limit of 100 sites per import, which only matters for agencies.

For manual verification, pick one method:

• XML file: download BingSiteAuth.xml and upload it to the root of your site, so it loads at example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml.
• Meta tag: paste the msvalidate.01 meta tag Bing gives you into the head section of your homepage.
• CNAME record: add the DNS record Bing shows at your domain provider. Some providers support Domain Connect, which adds it for you after you sign in.

How do you submit a sitemap and check single URLs?

Open the Sitemaps section, select the option to submit a sitemap and paste the full address, such as https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. If you imported from Search Console, check that your sitemaps are already listed before adding them again.

URL Inspection shows whether Bing has indexed a specific page and lets you run a live check of the current version. Requesting indexing from URL Inspection uses the same daily quota as the URL Submission tool. Bing shows your current quota in the tool, and its help pages say it can be revised over time.

Manual submission is fine for a handful of pages. For anything regular, such as new blog posts or product updates, Microsoft now recommends IndexNow as the main way to tell Bing about changes.

What is IndexNow and which search engines use it?

IndexNow is an open protocol for pushing change notices to search engines. Instead of waiting for a crawler to revisit your site, you send a short request saying a URL was added, updated or deleted, and the engine can recrawl it sooner.

Per indexnow.org, participating engines share submitted URLs with each other, so one notice reaches all of them. At the time of writing the site lists Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, and its FAQ also lists an Amazon endpoint. The list changes, so check the site for the current one.

Google does not use IndexNow. Google said in 2021 that it would test the protocol, but it is not listed as a participant and has not announced support. Google still finds pages through its own crawling, your sitemap and Search Console.

IndexNow tells engines a page changed; it does not guarantee indexing or rankings. Keep your sitemap too, since it lists every page while IndexNow only flags recent changes.

How do you set up IndexNow by hand?

There are three steps. First, create a key: 8 to 128 characters using letters, numbers and dashes. Second, host it as a UTF-8 text file named after the key at your site root, containing only the key, for example https://www.example.com/8f3c2a9e41b74d6c.txt. Third, send your changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint.

For one URL a simple GET request works. For many URLs, send a POST with a JSON body. One request can hold up to 10,000 URLs, all from the same host.

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "8f3c2a9e41b74d6c",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/8f3c2a9e41b74d6c.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/new-product",
    "https://www.example.com/blog/updated-post"
  ]
}

The same request as a command you can paste into a terminal (swap in your own domain, key and URLs):

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{"host":"www.example.com","key":"8f3c2a9e41b74d6c","keyLocation":"https://www.example.com/8f3c2a9e41b74d6c.txt","urlList":["https://www.example.com/new-product"]}'

keyLocation is optional when the key file sits at the root under its own name. The responses tell you what happened:

• 200: received. This confirms receipt only, not indexing.
• 202: received, key validation still pending.
• 400: the request format is wrong.
• 403: the key file was not found or does not contain the key.
• 422: the URLs do not belong to the host, or the key does not match.
• 429: too many requests. Only resubmit a URL when it really changed.

Which plugins and CDNs support IndexNow?

Most sites do not need to write any code. Bing's IndexNow getting started page lists the integrations it knows about:

• Built in: Wix Studio, Duda, GoDaddy Website Builder, XenForo, Milestone and Shopify. Bing says these need no setup.
• WordPress: the IndexNow plugin, Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress. Features vary by plugin and by free or paid edition, so check your plugin's settings.
• Cloudflare: Crawler Hints sends IndexNow notices when Cloudflare sees that content likely changed. Cloudflare's docs say it is available on all plans, including Free, and it is switched on in the Caching settings.

Where you can, use one source of notices, so it is easy to tell which one is working. After switching it on, open the IndexNow section in Bing Webmaster Tools to confirm that your submissions arrive.

What does the AI Performance report show?

In February 2026 Bing released AI Performance as a public preview inside Bing Webmaster Tools. According to the official announcement, it shows how often your content is cited as a source in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.

• Total Citations: how many times your pages appeared as a source in AI answers in the chosen period.
• Average Cited Pages: the daily average of unique pages from your site that were cited.
• Grounding queries: a sample of the phrases the AI used when it retrieved your content.
• Page-level activity and trends: citation counts per URL and over time.

Bing is clear that citation counts do not show where in an answer you appeared or how prominent the citation was. As a preview, the report may change. Use it to see which pages AI systems already pick up, then improve the ones that should appear but do not.

Bing only cites what its crawler can reach. Check that robots.txt and your firewall let Bingbot in (our AI crawler robots.txt guide explains how). You can run a free Growli audit to test crawler access, including firewall blocks, your sitemap and pages whose content only appears after JavaScript runs.