Bing Search Console: setting up Bing Webmaster Tools for a store, and the reports worth opening

Most store owners who use Search Console have never opened Bing’s equivalent. For years that was a defensible choice: Bing sends a small share of a typical store’s search traffic, and the work of verifying a second property rarely paid for itself.

Two things changed. Verification takes minutes if you already have Search Console, because Bing imports the property. And Bing now reports how often Microsoft’s AI answers cite your pages, a number no other search engine shows a store owner.

The examples follow a small coffee roaster selling single-origin beans, espresso blends, grinders and brewing kit, with a blog of brew guides. Nothing here depends on the platform; the store could be on Shopify, WooCommerce or anything else.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free service for site owners, the Bing counterpart to Google Search Console. It shows the queries your pages appear for in Bing, the clicks and impressions they earn, which pages Bing has crawled and indexed, and the errors it hit on the way.

People search for it as “Bing Search Console” because they already use Google’s tool. The two look similar, and the overlap covers the basics:

• A search performance report with clicks, impressions, average position and click-through rate by query and page.
• Sitemap submission and a record of when each sitemap was last read.
• URL Inspection, which shows whether a single page is indexed and what Bing saw when it last crawled it.
• Crawl and indexing reports that flag blocked, broken and redirected URLs.

Microsoft’s own comparison of the two tools is a fair summary, allowing for who wrote it.

Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth setting up for a store?

Yes, if you already have Search Console, because the setup cost has dropped to a few minutes and it answers one question Google’s tool cannot. It is not worth building a routine around. Open it once a month, not once a week.

The honest case against is traffic. For most stores Google sends the large majority of organic visits, so check your own analytics: if Bing’s share is small, its performance report will not change a decision you make.

The case for rests on three things:

1. Bing’s index feeds more than Bing. Microsoft Copilot and the AI summaries in Bing results draw on it, and Microsoft says its AI citation reporting also covers “select partner integrations”. A page Bing has not indexed cannot be cited by any of them.
2. It reports AI citations. Search Console lumps AI Overviews into its ordinary web search data and tells you nothing about citations as such. Bing breaks them out.
3. It is a second opinion on crawling. When a page is missing from Google’s index, checking whether Bing indexed it separates a problem with the page from a problem with how Google is treating it.

How do you add your store to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools, choose Import on the My Sites page, and authorise it to read your Search Console account. Your verified properties and their sitemaps come across, and Bing marks them as verified without any tag or DNS record.

Microsoft’s announcement of the import feature sets out the steps:

1. Sign in with a Microsoft or Google account.
2. On My Sites, choose Import rather than adding a site by URL.
3. Sign in to the Google account that owns your Search Console property and allow access to your list of verified sites and sitemaps.
4. Tick the properties you want and import them.

Two details from Microsoft’s instructions matter later. Bing “will periodically validate your site ownership status by syncing with your Google Search Console account”, so if you revoke that access, or lose ownership in Search Console, Bing will ask you to verify again another way. And traffic data can take up to 48 hours to appear, so an empty dashboard on day one is normal.

If you do not use Search Console, or would rather not connect the accounts, the manual routes are the familiar ones: a meta tag in the theme’s head, an XML file uploaded to the root, or a CNAME record in DNS. On a hosted platform where you cannot upload files to the root, the meta tag or DNS record are the practical choices. The same ownership rule applies as in Google’s tool: the business should own the property, and agencies should be added as users, as our guide to adding users in Search Console explains.

Which Bing Webmaster Tools reports are worth checking?

Three reports earn a monthly look for a store: AI Performance, Search Performance and the indexing view in Site Explorer. The rest are useful once, during an audit, and then rarely.

AI Performance

This is the report that justifies the account. Launched in public preview in February 2026, it counts how often your pages are shown as sources in AI answers across Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and Microsoft’s partners. Microsoft’s introduction to the AI Performance report lists what it shows:

• Total citations over the date range.
• Average cited pages per day.
• Grounding queries, the phrases the AI used to retrieve your content.
• Citation counts per page.

Two limits come straight from that post. The data is a sample, and it shows how often a page is referenced “without indicating placement or presentation within a specific answer”. There are no clicks. A citation is evidence that the content was used, not that anyone visited.

For the coffee roaster, the grounding queries are the useful part. If the guide to dialling in an espresso grinder is cited for queries about grind size for a moka pot, that is a question the store answers well enough to be quoted, and a candidate for its own page. It also works as a check on the advice in our guide to getting a store cited by ChatGPT and Google’s AI: if a page was rewritten to answer questions directly, its citation count should move.

Search Performance

The same four numbers as Google’s Performance report, for Bing: clicks, impressions, average position and click-through rate, by query and by page. Read it the same way, and do not add it to Search Console’s numbers as if they measured the same audience.

It is good for comparison. The roaster’s cold brew guide at position 3 in Bing and 14 in Google points at something Google weighs differently, often a stronger competitor page or a canonical problem. The striking distance method works on Bing’s data too, though with less traffic behind each query the list is shorter.

Site Explorer and URL Inspection

Site Explorer shows your site as Bing has crawled it, folder by folder, with counts of indexed pages, errors and redirects. It is the fastest way to see whether Bing has picked up a new collection or whole sections of the blog.

When a page matters and is missing, URL Inspection in Bing gives the same kind of answer as Google’s: indexed or not, and why. If a brew guide is indexed in Bing and reported as crawled, currently not indexed in Google, the page is reachable and readable, and the question is about quality or duplication in Google’s eyes rather than a technical fault.

The ones to try once

Bing also has a keyword research tool on its own search data, a Site Scan for on-page problems, and a backlinks report that shows other domains’ links as well as yours. Worth one pass each. A Site Scan flagging the same long title across hundreds of product pages is one theme template, not hundreds of problems.

What is IndexNow, and does a store need it?

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL has been added, changed or deleted, instead of waiting for them to crawl. The IndexNow documentation says participating engines “agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines”, so one ping reaches all of them.

Bing is the main participant. Google is not, and still relies on its own crawling and sitemaps. That shapes how much it is worth to a store:

• For price and stock changes, it helps Bing reflect them sooner. For a roaster whose seasonal lots sell out, that is a small but real benefit.
• For new blog posts, it gets them in front of Bing quickly, and so in front of Copilot. Google will find them through the sitemap and internal links as usual.
• For deleted products, it tells Bing to drop the URL rather than keep crawling a page that is gone.

Implementation is a key file at the domain root plus a request per changed URL. Some platforms and plugins do it for you, so check before building anything. Otherwise, Bing’s URL Submission tool does the same job by hand for the few pages a store publishes each week.

What does Bing Webmaster Tools not do well?

It does not replace Search Console, and its traffic numbers are too small for most stores to act on alone. A query with a dozen Bing impressions a month is noise, and the roaster should not rewrite a product page on the strength of it. The AI Performance report is a preview and a sample, and Microsoft says so; treat its trends as direction, not measurement.

And it tells you where you stand in Microsoft’s world only. Nothing in it says whether Google’s AI Overviews cite you, and nothing in Search Console will either, so for Google the check is still a manual search for the questions your pages answer.

How does this fit into running a store’s SEO?

Bing Webmaster Tools is a monthly check, not a weekly job. The weekly work stays where the traffic is: Search Console’s queries, the pages close to page one, and the posts that answer what customers ask, which is the loop set out in the working system behind a store that ranks.

Our Search Insights module does that weekly reading of Search Console data, the content calendar and Blog Writer turn it into posts, and Wise Links keeps the internal links that help any crawler, Bing’s included, find them. QueryClimb buys back the hours; the manual version with Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and a spreadsheet works, and costs nothing but time. The case study shows what the routine did for our own store, and pricing shows the cost.

Frequently asked questions

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes. There is no paid tier. You need a Microsoft or Google account to sign in, and a site you can verify, either through the Search Console import or by meta tag, XML file or DNS record.

Is Bing Search Console the same as Bing Webmaster Tools?

Yes. There is no product called Bing Search Console; it is the name people search for because they know Google’s tool. Microsoft’s product is Bing Webmaster Tools, and it does the same job for Bing that Search Console does for Google.

How do I import my site from Google Search Console to Bing?

In Bing Webmaster Tools, go to My Sites, choose Import, and sign in to the Google account that owns your Search Console property. Allow access, select the properties to import, and they arrive verified with their sitemaps. Expect up to 48 hours before traffic data appears.

Do I need to submit my sitemap to Bing separately?

Not if you imported from Search Console, because the sitemaps come across with the property. Check the Sitemaps page after the import to confirm Bing has read it. If you verified manually, submit the same sitemap URL you gave Google.

Does Bing Webmaster Tools show ChatGPT traffic?

No. Its AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and unnamed partner integrations, and it does not report clicks from any of them. Visits from ChatGPT or any other assistant show up, if at all, as referral traffic in your own analytics.