On this page · 13 sections
- How Bing ranks pages: the 6 parameters Microsoft publishes
- Step 1: Set up Bing Webmaster Tools (and import from Search Console)
- Step 2: Get indexed fast with sitemaps, IndexNow and URL Submission
- Step 3: Fix technical issues with Site Scan, URL Inspection and Crawl Control
- Step 4: Write pages Bing can rank and Copilot can quote
- Step 5: Copilot search visibility: what Microsoft documents
- Step 6: Local businesses: claim Bing Places too
- Where Bing differs from Google
- What gets a site demoted or removed on Bing
- Common Bing ranking problems and fixes
- For IT and marketing teams
- How eCorpIT can help
- References
Summary. To rank on Bing, verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (a site verified in Google Search Console can be imported and is verified automatically), submit an XML sitemap, send changed URLs through IndexNow, and work on the six ranking parameters Microsoft publishes in general order of importance: relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and language, and page load time. Copilot queries the Bing search service when web search is on, so the same work decides whether Copilot can cite you. The limits: IndexNow takes up to 10,000 URLs per POST and shares each notice with Amazon, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep; URL Submission allows up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day, at most 500 per API batch. AI Performance, in public preview since 10 February 2026, counts how often Copilot cites your pages. The change to plan for: Microsoft's new AI Training and AI Grounding preferences take effect from 1 February 2027 and replace NoArchive and NoCache for those uses after 1 March 2027.
About this article. This guide is for site owners, marketers and developers who want Bing traffic and Copilot citations. We checked every step, limit and setting on 11 November 2026 against Bing Webmaster Tools help, the Bing blogs, Microsoft Support, Microsoft Learn, IndexNow.org and Google Search Central. Bing Webmaster Tools is a web app without version numbers: the steps match its help pages on that date, and labels can change. No vendor paid for inclusion. Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team.
How Bing ranks pages: the 6 parameters Microsoft publishes
Microsoft's support page on how Bing delivers results lists the main ranking parameters in general order of importance, and says their weight varies from search to search and changes over time. That list is the closest thing to an official Bing SEO checklist.
| # | Parameter | What Microsoft says Bing looks at | What to do on your site |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Relevance | Terms on the page, phrases in links pointing to it, and synonyms or abbreviations | One clear intent per page; descriptive internal anchor text |
| 2 | Quality and credibility | Clarity of purpose, usability, presentation, and authority: reputation of linking sites, level of discourse, fact separated from opinion, first-hand or attributed content | Named authors, a real About page, cited sources, original data |
| 3 | User engagement | Whether searchers click, stay or quickly return to Bing, and whether they rephrase the query | Titles that match the page; answer near the top |
| 4 | Freshness | Bing generally prefers up-to-date content, though much stays useful for years | Update pages when facts change; send them through IndexNow |
| 5 | Location and language | The searcher's country and city, page hosting location, page language, and where other visitors are | hreflang, local addresses, regional pages |
| 6 | Page load time | Slow pages count as a poor experience | Fix server response time, image weight and render-blocking scripts |
Microsoft names engagement signals plainly, so a title that overpromises can win the click and still lose ground; and unattributed summaries fail the credibility test.
Step 1: Set up Bing Webmaster Tools (and import from Search Console)
Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is free. The flow below follows Microsoft's June 2025 setup guide and the current help page on adding and verifying a site:
- Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
- If the site is verified in Google Search Console, choose the import option and allow BWT to read that account. Selected sites are added and verified automatically, with their sitemaps (up to 100 per import, 1,000 per account).
- Otherwise add the site manually and verify it with Domain Connect (sign in to a supported DNS provider and BWT adds the record), the BingSiteAuth.xml file at the site root, a meta tag in the homepage head, or a CNAME record you add in DNS.
- Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps, or add a
Sitemap:line to robots.txt.
- Turn on IndexNow (Step 2) and run your first Site Scan (Step 3).
Reports usually start filling about 48 hours after you add a site, with no data from before that date. You then get Search Performance with up to 16 months of clicks, impressions and average position, plus URL Inspection, keyword research, backlink data, a robots.txt tester, Crawl Control, Recommendations and a built-in Copilot assistant that Microsoft opened to all users on 18 March 2025. Sign in with an account the business controls, not a freelancer's personal login.
Step 2: Get indexed fast with sitemaps, IndexNow and URL Submission
Bing offers three ways to announce pages, and Microsoft recommends sitemaps and IndexNow together.
Sitemaps: the full inventory
Bing supports up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap file and up to 50,000 child sitemaps in one index file. It fetches a sitemap as soon as you submit it or reference it in robots.txt, then rereads it, typically at least once a day. BWT also accepts RSS, Atom and plain-text sitemaps, but XML is preferred because it carries lastmod.
The field that matters is lastmod. Bing uses it to decide which URLs to recrawl, and asks for ISO 8601 with both date and time, for example 2026-11-11T09:30:00+05:30. It ignores changefreq and priority. Set lastmod to when the content changed, not when the sitemap was generated. List only canonical URLs and drop deleted or redirected ones promptly.
IndexNow: push changes the moment they happen
IndexNow is an open protocol. You notify one participating engine when a URL is added, updated, redirected or deleted, and it shares the notice with the others. The IndexNow FAQ lists endpoints for Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, plus a global one at api.indexnow.org. Google is not on the list.
- Check your platform first. IndexNow.org lists support in WordPress, Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, Duda, Joomla!, Drupal, PrestaShop and others, and Cloudflare has a native integration. If yours is covered, switch it on and stop.
- Otherwise generate a key of 8 to 128 characters (letters, digits and hyphens) and save it as a UTF-8 file named
{your-key}.txtat the site root, containing only the key.
- Send changed URLs: one at a time with a GET request, or up to 10,000 in a single POST.
POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
{
"host": "www.example.com",
"key": "your-key",
"urlList": [
"https://www.example.com/pricing/",
"https://www.example.com/blog/new-post/"
]
}
- Read the response code. 200 means received; 202 means received while the key is validated, normal on a first request; 400 a malformed request; 403 a missing or mismatched key file; 422 URLs outside the host or a malformed key; 429 too many requests.
Three FAQ rules prevent most trouble: every submitted URL counts against your crawl quota, so send only meaningful changes; wait at least 5 minutes before resubmitting a URL; and submit redirected and deleted (404 or 410) URLs too. Bing's guidelines also prefer a steady stream of submissions over occasional large batches.
URL Submission in Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing's URL Submission help sets a quota of up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day, applied at domain level rather than per subdomain and reset at midnight UTC; the quota may be revised, and support can raise it. For automation, the Webmaster API's SubmitUrlBatch method accepts at most 500 URLs per call, and Microsoft says to call GetUrlSubmissionQuota first.
Microsoft now strongly recommends IndexNow and says the URL and Content Submission APIs may be deprecated. And the SOAP and POX versions of the Webmaster API stopped being served on 31 August 2026, leaving only JSON. Our SOAP and POX retirement checklist covers that migration.
Step 3: Fix technical issues with Site Scan, URL Inspection and Crawl Control
A page Bing has not crawled cannot compete on any parameter, so fix crawl and index issues first:
- Site Scan audits a website, sitemap or URL list on demand and sorts issues into errors, warnings and notices; fix errors first. Bing sets the monthly quota, and you can keep five scans.
- URL Inspection shows index status, SEO issues and markup for one URL; its Live URL tab shows what Bingbot fetches now, and requesting indexing uses URL Submission quota.
- Robots.txt tester confirms Bingbot can reach the pages and assets you want indexed.
- Crawl Control sets Bingbot's crawl rate for each hour of the day; a crawl-delay line in robots.txt overrides it.
- Recommendations lists site-wide issues by severity with the affected pages.
Microsoft's October 2025 guidance on content for AI search adds three warnings: do not hide key answers in tabs or expandable menus, which AI systems may not render; do not rely on PDFs for core information; do not put important details only in images. The guidelines add 301 redirects for permanent moves (302 only for under two days), 404 for removed pages, and no critical content hidden behind client-side rendering.
Step 4: Write pages Bing can rank and Copilot can quote
Pages that searchers can scan are pages Copilot can split into usable pieces.
- Align title, H1 and description. Microsoft calls these important signals of purpose and scope; write them in natural language, not stacked keywords.
- Answer first. Put a one- or two-sentence answer under each question-style heading; Microsoft notes assistants can lift Q&A pairs almost word for word. Keep one main topic per URL, with key information near the top.
- Make facts stand alone. Bing's guidelines favour explicit facts visible on the URL itself, with people, organisations and products named consistently.
- Use lists and tables for facts. They are easier to extract than long paragraphs.
- Add JSON-LD schema that matches the visible page; Bing ignores misleading markup, and schema does not guarantee grounding.
- Support claims with evidence and keep them current. Microsoft's AI Performance announcement lists examples, data, cited sources and regular updates among the ways to strengthen content.
- Earn links from trusted sites. Bing's link building help values a few links from sites it trusts over volume, and says bought-link patterns are easy to spot.
Most of a Google checklist carries over; our guide to ranking on Google's first page covers the shared basics.
Step 5: Copilot search visibility: what Microsoft documents
When web search is on, Copilot parses the prompt, generates a search query of a few words, sends it to the Bing search service and composes the answer from what Bing returns. Copilot Chat shows the exact queries in its citations, and these queries do not affect Bing ranking. So if Bing has not indexed your page, Copilot's web search cannot retrieve it.
Bing's May 2026 post on the role of the index explains what follows. Grounding uses the same crawlers and quality signals as search, but it looks for discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance; a stale fact can produce a wrong answer, and conflicting sources must be detected rather than silently ranked. Dated, sourced, unambiguous facts make better grounding material than opinion.
Measure citations with AI Performance and Topics Portfolio
Since 10 February 2026, BWT has included AI Performance in public preview. Covering Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and selected partners, it reports total citations, average cited pages per day, sample grounding queries (the phrases the AI used to retrieve your content), page-level citations and a trend line. Citations are not rankings, clicks or traffic. On 16 June 2026 Microsoft added Intents, Topics, Citation Share (your percentage of all citations for a grounding query) and Compare in preview.
On 13 October 2026 came Topics Portfolio, a beta tab that clusters grounding queries into themes with Topic Size (approximate citations across all sites), Sites Cited and Queries over one to three months, plus Top Opportunity Queries where others are cited and you are not. Smaller sites may not see it.
Control what Copilot can use
Since 15 October 2025 Bing has supported the data-nosnippet attribute: marked content stays indexed and available for ranking but is kept out of snippets and AI-generated answers, including Copilot. Use it for subscriber-only text or legal boilerplate, but sparingly, because the current guidelines warn that data-nosnippet and nosnippet may limit the quality of Copilot citations. Noindex keeps a whole page out of Bing and Copilot.
Today, NoArchive stops Bing linking a page in Copilot, and NoCache limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. On 30 October 2026 Microsoft announced two independent preferences that replace them for AI use:
- AI Training (allow or disallow) uses the shared robots.txt syntax from the IETF AI Preferences working group, and Microsoft also reads it per page.
- AI Grounding (allow, disallow, or DisallowExtended, which keeps Microsoft's own experiences such as Copilot but excludes grounding services Microsoft provides to third parties) is set per page only.
# robots.txt: opt the whole site out of AI training
User-Agent: __usage_ai-training
Disallow: /
# per page, as a meta tag or an HTTP response header
<meta name="Bingbot" content="ai-grounding:disallow">
X-Robots-Tag: Bingbot: ai-training:disallow
Both default to allow, and neither changes eligibility for normal Bing results. The dates: from 15 December 2026, sites using NoArchive or NoCache can record a temporary grounding preference in BWT; from 1 February 2027 Microsoft honours the new preferences as it recrawls; after 1 March 2027 NoArchive and NoCache stop counting for training or grounding; temporary preferences lapse on 30 September 2027. Microsoft warns that limiting grounding reduces visibility in AI answers, so a business that wants Copilot citations should leave it allowed. Google said the same day that it aims to support the shared training signal in 2027.
Step 6: Local businesses: claim Bing Places too
Microsoft's AI Performance announcement recommends Bing Places for Business so that address, hours and contact details stay current and eligible for AI-generated responses. You need not build the listing twice: Bing Places, which moved to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025, imports listings from Google Business Profile. Its setup screens offer instant verification for imported profiles and an ongoing sync, and synced listings are edited in Google, not in the Bing Places dashboard.
So build and verify your Google Business Profile first (our guide on how to add your business on Google covers verification), then import it into Bing Places.
Where Bing differs from Google
| Area | Bing | |
|---|---|---|
| Ranking documentation | Ordered list of six main parameters on Microsoft Support | A guide to its ranking systems rather than an ordered parameter list |
| Push indexing | IndexNow for any URL, plus BWT URL Submission (up to 10,000 URLs a day, 500 per API batch) | Not an IndexNow participant; its Indexing API covers only JobPosting and livestream (BroadcastEvent) pages |
| Sitemap signals | lastmod with date and time; changefreq and priority ignored; reread at least daily | Uses lastmod only if consistently accurate; ignores priority and changefreq |
| Crawl scheduling | Hour-by-hour Crawl Control in BWT | Documents ways to reduce crawl rate |
| AI answer surfaces | Microsoft Copilot web search, Bing AI summaries, select partners | AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| AI citation reporting | AI Performance: citations, grounding queries, Citation Share, Topics Portfolio; no click data | Search Console generative AI reports: impressions by page, country, device and date |
| AI use controls | AI Training (robots.txt or page) and AI Grounding (page) from 1 February 2027 | Google-Extended today; aims to support the shared training signal in 2027 |
| Local listings | Bing Places, which can import and sync from Google Business Profile | Google Business Profile |
| AI-specific rule | Guidelines name prompt injection as abuse | Spam policies do not name prompt injection |
The Google column draws on Google Search Central documentation. The biggest practical gap is push indexing: on Bing, an IndexNow call reports a change as you publish.
What gets a site demoted or removed on Bing
The Bing Webmaster Guidelines list practices that can lead to reduced rankings, suppressed or lost grounding eligibility, ignored structured data or removal from the index. The ones that catch ordinary businesses:
- Cloaking: serving different content to crawlers and visitors.
- Link schemes: bought links, private networks and artificial social promotion.
- Duplicate and scraped content: the same content across many URLs, or lightly rewritten copies.
- Keyword stuffing: repetition or unnatural phrasing, including language engineered to trigger AI citations.
- Mass auto-generated content without editorial review.
- Thin affiliate pages without original reviews or comparisons.
- Misleading structured data that does not match the visible page.
- Prompt injection: content designed to manipulate the language models Bing or Copilot use.
Because grounding penalties are listed separately, a site could keep blue-link rankings and still lose AI citations. If action was taken in error, contact support through BWT.
Common Bing ranking problems and fixes
These fixes draw on the IndexNow FAQ, the guidelines and Bing's robots meta tag help.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Verified for weeks, few pages indexed | No sitemap, robots.txt blocks, or pages Bing judges low quality | Submit the sitemap, test robots.txt, inspect sample URLs, run Site Scan |
| IndexNow returns 403 | Key file missing, renamed or containing extra text | Host the key file at the root with only the key; open it in a browser to check |
| IndexNow returns 422 | URL host does not match the key's host | Each subdomain needs its own key file and submissions |
| IndexNow returns 429 | Too many submissions | Honour Retry-After, debounce, send only real changes |
| Updates take days to appear | lastmod set to sitemap build time on every URL | Write true content-change times; push key pages through IndexNow |
| Ranks on Bing but never cited in Copilot | Facts hidden in tabs, PDFs or images; vague answers; NoArchive or NoCache set | Answer-first HTML, tables, dated sources; check robots meta tags; review grounding queries in AI Performance |
| Pages indexed but not served | Possible guideline issue or quality assessment | Audit against the guidelines, fix, then contact Bing Webmaster support |
For IT and marketing teams
- Put IndexNow in the publishing pipeline. Trigger submissions from the CMS or CI/CD job on publish, update, unpublish and redirect, log every response code, and alert on repeated 4xx errors. Rotate the key by replacing the file and submitting with the new key.
- Treat the key as configuration. IndexNow says only you and the search engines should know the key and file location, so keep it out of public repositories.
- Know your buyers' Copilot settings. Microsoft 365 admins control web search with the Allow web search in Copilot policy in Cloud Policy service, and users have a Web content toggle. If a customer's tenant has web search off, Copilot will not surface your site to their staff. Admins can also audit those generated queries in Microsoft Purview.
- Decide your AI preferences before 1 March 2027. If your site uses NoArchive or NoCache, publish the new tags and record a temporary grounding preference in BWT once that option opens on 15 December 2026.
- Keep listings owned by the company. BWT, Bing Places and Google Business Profile should sit under company accounts, with agencies added as users, not owners.
For a site-wide view across Google, Bing and AI answers, our AEO vs GEO vs SEO guide sets out how the disciplines fit together, and our guide to ranking in ChatGPT and AI search covers assistants beyond Copilot.
How eCorpIT can help
eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based technology organisation, founded in 2021, assessed at CMMI Level 5 and MSME certified, with senior-led engineering teams working across AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms. Our SEO, AEO and GEO audit checks a site against Bing's and Google's published guidelines, including sitemaps, IndexNow, crawl health and AI citation visibility. Talk to us at /contact-us/.
Last updated: 11 November 2026.
References
- Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility, 17 June 2025 — Bing Webmaster Blog
