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To index your site on Bing, add the domain to Bing Webmaster Tools, verify ownership, submit the sitemap and turn on IndexNow. Then check your main pages with URL Inspection. Bing is the foundation of Copilot and, according to Microsoft, it powers ChatGPT. So indexing also matters for AI.
In short
- Bing Webmaster Tools is free and imports sites already verified in Search Console, with no new verification.
- IndexNow alerts Bing when a page changes, but it does not guarantee indexing. The sitemap, in turn, covers the site’s inventory.
- Copilot uses the Bing index. In ChatGPT, however, a 2026 study found mostly results from Google and from OpenAI’s own index. Bing only showed up on a Team plan account.
- The AI Performance report shows your site’s citations in Copilot and in partners, but it does not show clicks or traffic.
How do you index your site on Bing Webmaster Tools?
To index a site on Bing, follow six steps, from sign-up to checking your pages. According to Microsoft, the tool is free. In addition, if you already use Google Search Console, you can import your verified sites. In that case, Bing Webmaster Tools verifies them on its own, with no file, meta tag or DNS record.
- Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with the account that will manage the site.
- Add the site. Import it from Search Console or type the URL. The property can be the whole domain or just a folder, such as example.com/store/.
- Verify ownership if you did not import the site. The options are the BingSiteAuth.xml file at the root, a meta tag in the home page head, or a CNAME record in your DNS. With DNS providers that joined Domain Connect, verification can be automatic.
- Submit the sitemap in the Sitemaps section. Bing accepts XML, RSS, Atom and plain text. It also reads the sitemap address listed in robots.txt.
- Turn on IndexNow through your CMS plugin, your CDN or the API.
- Inspect your main URLs to confirm they made it into the index.
According to the Bing help page, site data usually takes 48 hours to show up after sign-up. With an import, Bing checks ownership in Search Console from time to time and brings in any new sitemaps it finds there. Each account can also hold up to 1,000 sites.
Does ChatGPT use Bing or Google to search?
Based on the available data, it uses both, plus its own index, but OpenAI does not disclose the mix. The ChatGPT help center lists Microsoft among its search providers. Microsoft, for its part, says Bing powers ChatGPT. However, a 2026 study found mostly results from Google and from OpenAI’s own index.
According to the OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT sometimes works with partner search providers and typically rewrites your question for them. The page points to the privacy policies of Microsoft, which owns Bing, and of Shopify. On the Bing Webmaster blog, Microsoft says Bing powers AI tools like ChatGPT.
What did the Resoneo study show?
Resoneo, a French SEO consultancy, analyzed 1,249 ChatGPT answers captured in July 2026. Until July 21, the data sent to the browser named the system that returned each result. Later, the consultancy began to infer the source from the format of each result.
In an August round, paid accounts in thinking mode, at medium effort, got about 75% of their results from Google. Those were Google results scraped by third parties. On the other hand, free accounts using the Think button got about 75% from OpenAI’s own index.
The researchers never saw Bing in the ChatGPT accounts they used, free and paid. However, a partner in the study saw Bing on a Team account in June. Jérôme Salomon, from Oncrawl, found it behind 93.7% of the sources. Resoneo suspects a deal between OpenAI and Microsoft for that plan, but it could not confirm it. After all, OpenAI does not publish where each result comes from, and the study is an outside reading.
In practice, it costs little to index your site on Bing. That covers Copilot and one of the doors into ChatGPT, but it does not guarantee a citation. ChatGPT also requires you to allow OAI-SearchBot, as the guide on how to show up in ChatGPT explains. In addition, indexing is one of the foundations of GEO, covered in the guide to what GEO is.
How do you submit a sitemap to Bing and use IndexNow?
Submit the sitemap once, in the Sitemaps section, and turn on IndexNow to flag each change. The sitemap gives Bing the inventory of your site. IndexNow, on the other hand, alerts Bing as soon as you create, change or remove a URL. The Bing guidelines ask for a sitemap and IndexNow, as well as internal links the crawler can follow.
According to Microsoft, Bing processes sitemaps at least once every 24 hours. Following the Bing guidance, list only canonical URLs and set lastmod to the date the content last really changed.
The sitemap does not replace internal links, especially for OpenAI crawlers. In a Resoneo test on one domain, GPTBot, the OpenAI training crawler, ignored the eight pages listed only in the sitemap. That same morning, however, it visited the eight pages that had a link. Bingbot, in contrast, reached the pages through the sitemap.
How do you turn on IndexNow for Bing?
To turn on IndexNow, your site hosts a text file with a key at its root, such as example.com/key.txt. Then it sends the URLs to one participating search engine, which shares them with the others. According to the IndexNow documentation, each submission can include up to 10,000 URLs, and a 200 code only confirms receipt.
On WordPress, the IndexNow page on Bing lists plugins such as Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress. On Cloudflare, the feature is Crawler Hints. Your submission history shows up in the IndexNow tab of Bing Webmaster Tools. Google, however, is not on the list of search engines that take part in the protocol.
Without IndexNow, you can submit URLs to Bing by hand in the Submit URLs section. The limit is 10,000 per domain per day. According to the Bing help page, repeat submissions do not speed up indexing. Microsoft also recommends IndexNow and warns that it may phase out direct URL submission.
How long does it take Bing to index a new page?
There is no guaranteed time frame to index a site on Bing. Site data shows up in Bing Webmaster Tools in about 48 hours. Bing generally reads sitemaps once a day. Then each page still goes through crawling and review. For AI answers, no tool can guarantee timing, according to Microsoft.
Without a notification, crawlers can take days or even weeks to find changes, according to the IndexNow FAQ. IndexNow raises the chance that Bing crawls the page sooner, but it does not guarantee immediate indexing. Each URL you submit counts toward the crawl quota of your site, so only flag meaningful changes.
OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to apply in ChatGPT search. Even so, a citation depends on the question and on competing pages. Finally, check the page in URL Inspection a few days after you submit it.
How do you check if your site is indexed on Bing?
Search Bing with the url: operator followed by the page address. If the page shows up in the results, it is in the index. For diagnosis, however, use URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools. It shows when Bing discovered, crawled and indexed the page, as well as the error that keeps it out.
According to the URL Inspection documentation, the Live URL tab shows what Bingbot sees when it downloads the page. It does this without requesting indexing. As soon as you fix an error, you can request indexing on the same screen, within the daily submission quota of your site.
For the whole site, use Site Explorer. According to Microsoft, it lists indexed pages, crawl blocks and error responses. To check Google at the same time, the SEO and AI guide shows indexing in both search engines.
Why isn’t Bing indexing your site or a page?
According to the Bing help page, common causes include a new site, crawl issues and a lack of links. A robots.txt block and a noindex tag also keep pages out. So do URLs blocked in Bing Webmaster Tools itself, content below the quality bar, and penalties for guideline violations or malware.
The same page explains that Bing needs to see at least one link pointing to a new site to find it. It prefers a few links from trusted sites over hundreds of random links. Submitting the sitemap does not skip any steps, because Bing still crawls and evaluates each page before indexing it. So open URL Inspection, where the index card shows the error and the suggested action.
Check your CDN as well. Since September 15, 2026, the Block and Block on pages with ads training options on Cloudflare also block Bingbot, including for search. The guide on how to check and allow AI crawlers on Cloudflare shows where to look. To decide crawler by crawler, see which AI crawlers to allow in robots.txt.
Two directives limit use in Copilot, even after Bing indexes the page. Under the Bing guidelines, noarchive keeps the content out of Copilot answers. By comparison, nocache limits Copilot to the URL, the title and the snippet.
Even after you index your site on Bing, the brand may not show up in ChatGPT or Copilot. In that case, see the reasons AI does not cite a brand.
What does the Bing AI report show?
AI Performance, a Bing Webmaster Tools report, counts how many times your pages became sources for AI answers. It covers Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partners. It also shows citations by page, the queries the AI used to find your content, and trends over time. However, it does not show clicks or traffic.
Microsoft launched the report in public preview in February 2026. In June, the Bing blog announced four preview features. Intents sorts queries by intent, while Topics groups them by theme. Citation Share shows the share of citations your site gets for each query, and Compare overlays two periods.
On October 13, 2026, a Microsoft post introduced Topics Portfolio in beta. It shows the size of each topic and the queries where the AI cites other sites but not yours. However, sites with little data may not see the feature. The authors add a warning:
“Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.”
Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam and Vivek Jain, Microsoft Bing (2026)
The data is a sample, refreshed daily, so rare citations may not appear. In September 2026, Copilot drove 2.17% of the visits that chatbots sent from Brazil to sites tracked by StatCounter. ChatGPT, on the other hand, drove 76.63%. Since Microsoft does not name the partners in the Bing report, track ChatGPT with fixed prompts. The guide on how to measure brand mentions and citations shows the method.
What we found when analyzing 8 pages on how to index a site on Bing
We analyzed the 8 Portuguese-language pages that came up in two searches on how to index and register a site on Bing. Five explain how to import from Search Console. Three mention IndexNow, and three mention URL Inspection. However, only one covers ChatGPT and the Bing AI report, and it claims ChatGPT has no index of its own.
Four give crawl or indexing time frames, from minutes to weeks, without citing a source. None mentions the quota of 10,000 URLs per day, the noarchive and nocache directives, or the Cloudflare change of September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Tools is free. If you already use Google Search Console, you can import your verified sites. In that case, Bing Webmaster Tools verifies them automatically, with no file, meta tag or DNS record.
Not necessarily. OpenAI says it does not guarantee placement in ChatGPT search and asks sites to allow OAI-SearchBot. According to Microsoft, Bing powers ChatGPT, but a 2026 Resoneo study found mostly results from Google and from OpenAI’s own index.
No. Bing keeps its own index. Importing the site from Search Console brings over the property and the sitemaps. Even so, Bing still has to crawl and evaluate each page before adding it to the index.
No. Google is not on the list of search engines that take part in IndexNow, which includes Bing, Naver, Seznam, Yandex, Yep and Amazon. So, for Google, submit your sitemap through Search Console.
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Main sources
- Bing Webmaster Tools help, Add and verify site (2026).
- Bing Webmaster Tools help, URL Submission (2026).
- Bing Webmaster Tools help, Bing Webmaster Guidelines (2026).
- IndexNow.org, frequently asked questions about the protocol (2026).
- Bing Search Blog, New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools (2026).
- Bing Webmaster Blog, Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility (2025).
- OpenAI, Searching the web with ChatGPT (2026).
- Resoneo, What ChatGPT pulls, what it shows, what it cites (2026).
