Bing Webmaster Tools: The Free SEO Data Source Nobody Checks

The search data everyone leaves on the table

Ask a room of small-business owners who has Google Search Console set up and most hands go up. Ask about Bing Webmaster Tools and you get blank looks. That is a mistake in 2026, because Bing's index now reaches far beyond bing.com: it powers the Windows search box, the default experience in Microsoft Edge, and results on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Most importantly, it feeds Microsoft Copilot, which answers questions for millions of people inside Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365.

If your customers are other businesses, the case is even stronger. Office computers overwhelmingly run Windows, often with Edge as the managed default browser, which means a meaningful slice of B2B searching never touches Google at all. And the toolset Microsoft gives you to understand that traffic is entirely free.

Set-up takes minutes if you have Search Console

Go to bing.com/webmasters, sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account, and choose the option to import from Google Search Console. Bing reads your verified GSC properties and copies the verification across, sitemaps included, so there is no DNS fiddling and no file uploads. If you would rather verify directly, the usual options exist: an XML file, a meta tag or a CNAME record.

Once verified, check that your XML sitemap appears under the Sitemaps section, submit it manually if it did not carry over, then give the reports a few days to start populating.

IndexNow: tell search engines the moment you publish

Waiting for a crawler to stumble across your new page is the old way. IndexNow is an open protocol, championed by Microsoft, that lets your site ping participating search engines the instant a URL is published, updated or deleted. Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver all listen, and one ping reaches them all. Google, notably, does not participate and still relies on crawling.

You almost certainly do not need to write any code for this. On WordPress, Rank Math and Microsoft's own IndexNow plugin handle the pings automatically, and Cloudflare users can switch on crawler hints in the dashboard. For a small site that publishes weekly, the practical benefit is that new content, price changes and corrections show up in Bing-powered surfaces in hours rather than days.

Keyword research with real numbers, not ranges

Google's Keyword Planner only shows precise search volumes to accounts spending money on ads; everyone else gets broad ranges like '100–1K'. The keyword research tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools gives actual query volumes drawn from Bing's own data, filterable by country and language, at no cost and with no ad account required.

The absolute volumes are smaller than Google's, but the proportions between keywords tend to be similar, which is what matters for prioritisation. The question filter is especially useful for content planning: it surfaces the 'how', 'what' and 'can' queries in your niche that make natural blog posts and FAQ entries.

The Search Performance report, meanwhile, shows the queries already sending you Bing traffic. Expect surprises. Bing's audience skews older and more desktop-heavy than Google's, and it often converts well for professional and financial services.

Site Scan: a free technical audit on demand

Site Scan is a proper crawler you point at your own site from inside the dashboard. It checks pages for missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, broken links, missing alt text, canonical problems and more, then groups the findings by severity so you can fix the worst first. For a small site it covers a good chunk of what paid audit tools do, without the subscription.

Alongside it you get a robots.txt tester and a URL inspection tool much like Google's, so you can check exactly how Bingbot sees any individual page and request indexing when something is missing.

Backlink data, including your competitors'

The Backlinks report shows who links to you, which is standard. What is unusual is that it also lets you look up the backlink profile of other domains and compare them side by side with your own. Ahrefs and Semrush charge meaningful monthly fees for that capability; Bing gives a workable version of it away.

Use it to find the directories, suppliers, trade bodies and local publications linking to competitors but not to you. Each one is a realistic outreach target, because they have already shown they link to businesses like yours.

Why this feeds Copilot, plus a 30-minute checklist

When Copilot answers a question with cited sources, those citations draw on Bing's index. A site that Bing cannot crawl, or has indexed poorly, is invisible to those answers. Clean structure, descriptive headings, schema markup and prompt IndexNow submission all raise the odds that your pages are the ones an AI answer quotes, complete with a link. Local businesses should also claim their free Bing Places listing, which powers Bing's map results.

• Import your site from Google Search Console at bing.com/webmasters.
• Confirm your sitemap is listed and processing.
• Switch on IndexNow via your SEO plugin or Cloudflare.
• Run a Site Scan and fix the high-severity findings.
• Check the keyword tool for question queries you have not answered yet.
• Claim your Bing Places listing if you serve local customers.

Half an hour of setup buys you a second stream of free search data for good. If you would rather someone handled it alongside your Google setup, our team at Thind Global Services can take care of it.