Short answer: submitting your site to Bing takes about ten minutes, and it matters far more than Bing's own search share suggests — because Bing's index is what Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT's web search, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and a dozen smaller engines run on. The fastest route: import your site into Bing Webmaster Tools straight from Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and switch on IndexNow so new and updated pages are picked up in minutes rather than weeks. Here's the whole process, step by step.
Why Bing matters more than its market share
On paper Bing is a single-digit share of worldwide searches — though on desktop, where Copilot is built into Windows and Edge, it's closer to a tenth of the market. The real reason to care is the multiplier: Bing's index is licensed and reused everywhere.
- Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in Bing search results.
- ChatGPT's web search draws on Bing's index — and ChatGPT alone now handles hundreds of millions of search-style queries a week.
- DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, Qwant, Kagi and many privacy-focused engines are built on Bing's results.
So a site that Bing can't see is invisible in all of those places at once. Being indexed on Bing is, in effect, being indexed in seven or eight engines — including the AI assistants people increasingly ask instead of typing into a search box. And because far fewer site owners bother, competition there is thinner.
Step 1 — Get into Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is Bing's free equivalent of Google Search Console: it's where you verify ownership, submit sitemaps, inspect URLs and see what Bing has crawled. Two ways in:
- Import from Google Search Console (fastest). Sign in at webmaster.bing.com with a Microsoft account, choose Import, sign in with the same Google account that owns your Search Console property, and allow access. Bing copies your verified sites and their sitemaps, and verification is done in a couple of minutes. If you've already set up Search Console (our guide to getting indexed by Google faster covers that), this is the whole job.
- Verify manually. Add the site by URL and prove ownership with an XML file uploaded to your root, a meta tag in your homepage's
<head>, or a DNS CNAME record.
Step 2 — Submit your sitemap
If you imported from Search Console your sitemap came along. Otherwise, open Sitemaps in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit its URL (XML, RSS, Atom and plain-text lists are all accepted). Bing will fetch it, report how many URLs it found, and re-check it periodically. Keep it accurate — stale sitemaps full of dead URLs slow discovery down.
Step 3 — Switch on IndexNow (the part most people skip)
Crawling is slow by nature: Bing has to guess when your pages change. IndexNow flips that around — you tell it. It's an open protocol, co-created by Microsoft, and one ping reaches every participating engine (Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep) at once.
- In Bing Webmaster Tools, open URL Submission → IndexNow and generate an API key.
- Host a text file named after the key in your site's root (Bing uses it to confirm you own the domain).
- Whenever you publish, update or delete a page, send a request such as
https://www.bing.com/indexnow?url=YOUR_PAGE&key=YOUR_KEY— or let your CMS or SEO plugin do it automatically; most major ones support IndexNow natively. - Check the submission history in Webmaster Tools: a 200 or 202 status means the URL was accepted.
Pages submitted this way typically appear in Bing within minutes to hours, and — because of the multiplier above — that also means faster visibility in Copilot and the engines on Bing's index.
Step 4 — Manual and API URL submission
For one-off pages, Submit URLs in Webmaster Tools lets you paste URLs by hand, with a generous daily quota per domain. Developers can do the same through the Webmaster REST API. Note that Bing retired its legacy SOAP and POX submission APIs on 31 August 2026 — anything still using them must move to REST or, better, IndexNow.
Step 5 — If you're a local business: Bing Places
Bing Places is the Bing equivalent of Google Business Profile — and far less crowded. You can import your Google Business Profile directly, so it takes minutes. It's one of the tier-one listings we recommend in local directories that feed the map pack, and it puts you on Bing Maps, Windows Maps and the map results Copilot shows.
What's a little different about ranking on Bing
Bing's guidelines are refreshingly plain: clear, descriptive titles and descriptions, well-structured pages, quality inbound links, and content that matches the words people actually search for. Bing tends to reward exact, literal relevance and established, well-linked pages a touch more than Google does, and it openly says it looks at social sharing as a signal. None of that requires separate "Bing SEO" — a clean, honest site with a sitemap and IndexNow gets the vast majority of the benefit.
The ten-minute checklist
- Import your site from Google Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools (or verify by file, tag or DNS).
- Confirm your sitemap is listed and error-free.
- Generate an IndexNow key, host the key file, and wire it into your CMS.
- Submit your most important new URLs once by hand.
- If you're local, import your Google Business Profile into Bing Places.
- Come back monthly to check crawl errors and the URL inspection tool.
Where AIO fits
Submitting to Bing is something you do yourself, free, once — AIO doesn't do it for you. What the network adds is more paths in: every listing you broadcast is a crawlable page on a separately hosted directory that links to your site, which is exactly the kind of inbound discovery that helps a new domain get found by Bing's crawler (and by the engines on its index) sooner. See do directory backlinks still help SEO? for the honest version of what that is and isn't worth.