Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow: Worth It for Bloggers?

Yes, Bing is worth one short setup session: Bing Webmaster Tools is free, can import your blog from Google Search Console, and shows Bing's own data about your site, while IndexNow tells Bing about each new post as you publish it. What neither will do is turn Bing into a second Google. Set them up once, then check in now and then.

How much Bing matters for a blog

Bing sends far fewer visits than Google. StatCounter, which counts visits that search engines send to the sites using its tracking code rather than searches, recorded Bing at 5.29% of search engine referrals worldwide in September 2026, against Google's 89.94%. In the United States, Bing's share was 9.89% and Google's 85.19% (StatCounter Global Stats, methodology).

Bing's index also reaches beyond bing.com. Bing's own Webmaster Guidelines describe how Bing shows content in its search experiences, in Copilot and in grounding API results, and say that "Bing and Copilot search experiences rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search." Bing's help pages carry no last-updated date; they were checked on 8 October 2026.

Your own analytics will show what Bing sends your blog today; what is organic traffic? explains where search visits appear. Two facts make the setup worth doing even if that number is small. It costs little time once you use Search Console. And Bing starts collecting your data only when you add the site: its Search Performance help says "you cannot see backdated data."

Set it up in one sitting

Set aside about 20 minutes. If you haven't set up Google Search Console, do that first: what is Google Search Console? walks through it, and the import below depends on it.

1. Sign in. Bing's getting started checklist says you can open a free account "using an existing Microsoft, Google or Facebook account."

2. Import from Search Console. Bing's Add and Verify site help explains that Bing Webmaster Tools asks permission to read your Search Console account, then lists your verified sites "along with the Sitemaps". Select your blog and click Import; imported sites "get automatically verified".

3. No Search Console? Verify by hand. Add the site's address, then pick one method: upload the BingSiteAuth.xml file to your site's root, paste a meta tag into your homepage's <head>, or add a CNAME record in your domain's DNS settings. Some DNS services can add the record for you once you sign in.

4. Turn on email alerts. Open the settings gear beside the notification icon, click Communication preference, turn on the toggle to receive communication and, under the alert preferences, choose Crawl errors and Index issues so problems reach your inbox (email alert help).

5. Turn on IndexNow if your platform supports it (see below).

Then wait. Bing says that once your site is added, "it usually takes 48 hours for our system to generate analytics and data." The import keeps working afterwards: when Bing rechecks your Search Console access, it imports any new sitemap it finds there. To stop that access, use Disconnect in your Bing profile.

What to check first

After a couple of days, four reports cover the useful ground for a blog:

• Search Performance. What it answers: Which searches show your blog on Bing and which posts get the clicks. What to look at first: Clicks and impressions over the period, then the Keywords and Pages tables. It covers up to six months.

• URL Inspection. What it answers: Is this post in Bing's index, and can Bingbot fetch it? What to look at first: Your homepage and newest post. The index card shows when the URL was "discovered, crawled, and indexed"; the Live URL tab shows "exactly what the Bingbot sees".

• Site Explorer. What it answers: Which parts of your site have problems. What to look at first: Its filters, such as dead links, server errors, robots.txt-disallowed URLs, NOINDEX tags and "URLs selected but not yet crawled".

• Sitemaps. What it answers: Did Bing read your sitemap? What to look at first: Each sitemap's last processing date and status; if you verified by hand and yours isn't listed, add it with Submit sitemaps.

Two details are worth knowing before you set these figures beside Search Console's. Bing counts an impression wherever your link appears on Bing, including a "Web search result, Chat response, News answer, Image result, Knowledge Panel". And the Keywords and Pages tables cover web results only (Search Performance help).

If a post is missing, Bing's not-in-the-index help lists the usual reasons: the site is new, Bing has trouble crawling it, no links point to it, robots.txt or a NOINDEX tag blocks it, or it falls below Bing's quality threshold. For the same question on Google, see why Google hasn't indexed your page.

Bing also has an AI Performance report, which counts how often your pages are cited in answers in "Microsoft Copilot", "AI-generated summaries in Bing" and "Select partner AI integrations" (AI Performance help). Treat it as a record of citations, not of visits.

What IndexNow does

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a page has changed. IndexNow.org calls it "a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted." One ping reaches every participant: engines that adopt it agree that "submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines" (IndexNow documentation).

IndexNow.org's participant list, checked on 8 October 2026, names Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazon's Amazonbot. Google isn't on it, so for Google your sitemap and Search Console stay the route; see XML sitemaps.

IndexNow's FAQ suggests checking your platform or SEO plugin before setting anything up by hand. These are the routes the vendors themselves document:

• WordPress, IndexNow Plugin. IndexNow support, as the vendor describes it: Free plugin from the Bing Webmaster team. It hosts the key for you, submits posts when they are created, updated or deleted, and skips noindex pages.

• Rank Math. IndexNow support, as the vendor describes it: "available in Rank Math Free out of the box": switch on the Instant Indexing module (Rank Math, updated 26 September 2023).

• Yoast SEO. IndexNow support, as the vendor describes it: Included in Yoast SEO Premium and "activated automatically" (Yoast, updated 1 April 2026).

• All in One SEO. IndexNow support, as the vendor describes it: Included in All in One SEO Pro, Basic plan or above (AIOSEO, updated 14 August 2026).

• Wix. IndexNow support, as the vendor describes it: Included with a Premium plan; Wix submits changed pages for you (Wix Help Center).

Switch it on in one place only. The IndexNow FAQ asks you not to send one URL repeatedly in a single day unless its content has meaningfully changed. To confirm it works, open the IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools: it lists submitted URLs with their source, such as the WordPress plugin, and whether each was crawled and indexed.

What IndexNow doesn't do

IndexNow notifies; the search engine still decides. The protocol says a successful response "only indicates that the search engine has received your URL." After that, the FAQ says, the engine weighs the crawl quota, its own scheduling and signals about quality to decide whether to crawl the URL, and "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing."

It also doesn't replace a sitemap. The FAQ recommends using both, and says IndexNow isn't built for sending your whole site's URLs all at once, or for older changes. Nor is there a shortcut by hand: Bing's URL Submission help recommends IndexNow and notes that "Repeated manual submissions do not accelerate indexing."

Your next step

Import your blog from Search Console today, switch on IndexNow if your platform or plugin offers it on your plan, and come back after two days to read Search Performance and inspect your newest post. After that, a monthly look alongside your Google figures is enough. To put those figures to work, see how to check your website's SEO performance.