Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow: The Fastest Way Into Copilot

In this article

1. Why Bing matters more for B2B than its search share suggests
2. Step 1: Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
3. Step 2: Read the AI Performance report
4. Step 3: Turn on IndexNow
5. What to push, and when
6. Frequently asked questions

Why Bing matters more for B2B than its search share suggests

Most marketing teams treat Bing as an afterthought because Google dominates search. AI changes that. Microsoft Copilot is built into Windows, Edge, Teams, Outlook and the rest of Microsoft 365, the tools your buyers use at work all day. When a procurement manager asks Copilot to shortlist suppliers, Copilot grounds its answer in Bing's index.

Bing also reaches beyond Copilot. Bing's AI Performance report counts citations in "select partner integrations", and OpenAI's ChatGPT search help page links Microsoft's privacy policy among its search providers. A page that's well indexed in Bing has more ways to be found by AI than a page that isn't.

Bing has also put AI answers into its official rules. Since February 2026, Bing's webmaster guidelines include generative engine optimization, defined as eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses.

Step 1: Set up Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
2. Choose Import from Google Search Console. It brings in your verified sites and sitemaps in one step. Otherwise, add your site and verify it with an XML file, a meta tag or a DNS record.
3. Under Sitemaps, confirm your XML sitemap is submitted and processed without errors.
4. Use URL Inspection on your five most important pages (homepage, top service or product pages, pricing, an industry page) to confirm they're indexed.
5. Check Site Explorer and the crawl reports for errors, blocked URLs and pages Bing found but didn't index.

Before going further, make sure Bingbot is allowed in robots.txt and isn't being challenged by your firewall. The free LLM Readiness Check tests the robots.txt side, and our firewall checklist covers the rest.

Step 2: Read the AI Performance report

In February 2026 Bing released AI Performance as a public preview. It's the first report from a major search engine that shows when AI answers cite your site. It covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations, and shows:

• Total citations: how many times your pages appeared as sources in AI answers in the selected period.
• Average cited pages: the average number of unique pages from your site cited per day.
• Grounding queries: a sample of the phrases the AI used when it retrieved your content. These show how Copilot phrases the searches behind its answers.
• Page-level citations: citation counts for individual URLs.
• Trends over time.

Two ways to use it: check which pages earn citations and make sure they're accurate and current, and read the grounding queries to find questions your site doesn't answer yet. Pair it with GA4's AI referral data (here's how) to see whether citations turn into visits.

Step 3: Turn on IndexNow

Normally a search engine finds changes by recrawling your site on its own schedule, which can take days or weeks for a smaller B2B site. IndexNow reverses that: when a page is added, updated or deleted, your site tells search engines immediately. Participating engines share every submission with each other, so one call reaches all of them.

Bing's Fabrice Canel put the case plainly in 2025: "Gen AIs value fresh content in particular, partly as a reference check of their LLM training data. Use the API at indexnow.org to push that information as it's published or updated."

Create and host your key

1. Generate a key of 8 to 128 characters (letters, numbers and dashes), for example a random 32-character hex string.
2. Save it in a UTF-8 text file named after the key, containing only the key, and upload it to your site root: https://www.example.com/<your-key>.txt.

Submit URLs

One URL (GET)

curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fservices%2Fcnc-machining&key=YOUR_KEY"

Several URLs at once (POST, up to 10,000 per request)

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "host": "www.example.com",
    "key": "YOUR_KEY",
    "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt",
    "urlList": [
      "https://www.example.com/services/cnc-machining",
      "https://www.example.com/pricing",
      "https://www.example.com/resources/new-guide"
    ]
  }'

Response codes tell you what happened. 200 or 202 means the submission was received (202 means the key is still being validated). 403 means the key file wasn't found or doesn't match, 422 means the URLs don't belong to your host, and 429 means you're sending too much. A 200 confirms receipt only. Indexing is still up to the search engine.

Automate it

• WordPress: Microsoft offers an IndexNow plugin, and many SEO plugins include IndexNow support. Turn on one, not several.
• Cloudflare: the Crawler Hints feature can send IndexNow notifications automatically when content changes.
• Static sites (Netlify, Vercel, custom builds): add a deploy step that compares the new sitemap with the previous one and submits changed URLs in a single POST.
• Headless CMS: trigger the POST from the CMS's publish webhook.

Only submit URLs that actually changed. IndexNow is for real updates. Resubmitting your whole site every day can get you rate-limited.

What to push, and when

• New pages: service, product, industry and location pages, plus new guides and case studies.
• Meaningful updates: pricing changes, new certifications, new locations, updated specs or lead times. These are the facts AI assistants get wrong when their copy is stale.
• Deletions and redirects: submit removed URLs too, so engines stop citing pages that no longer exist.

Then keep an eye on the result. Check URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools for the pages you pushed, and look for them in the AI Performance report over the following weeks.

Frequently asked questions

Free tool

Is Bingbot allowed on your site?

Copilot can only cite pages Bingbot can crawl. The free LLM Readiness Check tests Bingbot and 14 other AI crawlers against your robots.txt in 10 seconds.

Run the free check