Bing and Microsoft Copilot

Why Bing matters more than its market share

Copilot builds its answers on Bing search results. ChatGPT search has drawn on Bing as one of its providers too. So the same index quietly shapes answers in several places at once.

Most businesses have never set up Bing Webmaster Tools. That makes it one of the cheaper gaps to close in AI search.

What the work covers

• Bing Webmaster Tools. Verified, with your sitemap submitted, so you can see what Bing has and has not picked up.
• IndexNow. An open protocol that tells Bing, and other engines that support it, the moment a page is published or changed. We run it on our own site.
• Crawler access for bingbot, including through any bot protection your host adds.
• Bing Places for businesses with a local presence, which feeds Bing's maps and local answers.
• Pages that are easy to quote, the same standard as everywhere else in AI search.

Microsoft publishes data most platforms do not

Bing Webmaster Tools includes an AI Performance report, in beta at the time of writing, showing how often your content is cited in Copilot answers. First-party citation data is rare in this field. Most AI visibility numbers are estimates built from samples.

Discovered is not the same as indexed

We saw this firsthand when our own site launched. Bing listed the homepage as "discovered but not crawled" for more than a week. The site was fast, open to crawlers, and submitted through a sitemap and IndexNow. Bing decides how soon to crawl a new site largely by how much of the web links to it, and a new domain has little.

IndexNow made sure Bing knew the pages existed on day one. It did not make Bing fetch them. Knowing the difference saves a week of worrying about a problem that is not there.

What we will not claim

That Copilot will cite you by a certain date, or that IndexNow speeds up rankings. It speeds up discovery. What happens after that depends on the same things it always has.