On 5 October I opened Bing Webmaster Tools to check on my own site, expecting it to look much like Google Search Console. It did not.
Google had shown redmanstudio.co.uk about 136 times in its first five weeks. Bing had shown it twice. Of the eleven pages in my sitemap, Bing had indexed three: the homepage, the pricing page and one other. The service pages, the case studies and the local search page were not in Bing at all.
The reason was embarrassingly simple. I had verified the site with Bing weeks earlier and never submitted the sitemap. Bing had found three pages by stumbling across them, and that was all it knew about the studio.
I sell search work. The site is built so machines can read every word. And one of the two indexes that matter had barely opened it.
Why Bing matters more than its market share
Most people treat Bing as an afterthought because few people they know search on it. That was a reasonable view five years ago. It is not now.
Bing's index is what Microsoft's Copilot answers from, and it is one of the sources behind ChatGPT's web search and DuckDuckGo's results. When someone asks an assistant to recommend a web designer, a dentist or a restaurant in your town, the assistant can only name businesses whose pages it can find. If Bing has three of your pages, that is roughly what those assistants can see of you.
So a site can rank respectably on Google and still be close to invisible in the AI answers that more people now ask first. Nothing on the site looks wrong. You only find out by looking.
The four-minute check
You can run this on your own site without me.
- Search Bing for your own pages. Go to bing.com and search
site:yourdomain.co.uk, with your domain. Count the results and compare them with the number of pages you actually have. If Bing shows a handful and you have thirty pages, you have the same problem I did. - Open Bing Webmaster Tools. It is free at bing.com/webmasters. If you already use Google Search Console, choose "Import from Google Search Console" and it sets the site up in one step with no code changes.
- Look at the Sitemaps page. If it says "No data found", Bing has never been given your sitemap. Click "Submit sitemap" and enter your sitemap address, usually
yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml. - Check which site you are looking at. If you run more than one business, Bing Webmaster Tools opens on whichever site it likes. I first thought my numbers were a little better than they were because I was looking at a different site.
When I ran that check across all six of the sites I look after, three had never had a sitemap submitted to Bing. It is not a rare mistake.
What I changed on my own site
Two things, one manual and one permanent.
I submitted the sitemap. That took a minute. Bing read it eleven days later, on 16 October, and found all 21 addresses in it.
I stopped relying on Bing to come back on its own. Search engines revisit a new, small site when they get round to it, which can be weeks. There is an open standard called IndexNow that lets a site tell Bing, and the other engines that use it, "this page has changed, come and look". My site now does that by itself every morning: it checks which pages changed in the last three days and sends their addresses. Since 8 October it has sent 43 addresses, mostly new blog posts and updated service pages. When I publish this post, Bing will hear about it the next morning rather than whenever it next passes.
If your site runs on a common platform, check whether it already supports IndexNow. Several do, and it is often a single setting someone forgot to switch on.
What this has and has not done
Two weeks on, Bing has indexed six of my pages instead of three. It knows the sitemap exists and reads it. It hears about every change within a day.
And my Bing impressions are still two.
Being indexed is not the same as ranking. Indexing means Bing has read the page. Ranking means Bing thinks the page is the best answer to someone's question, and that depends on things a sitemap cannot give you: how long the site has existed, how many other sites link to it, and what people say about the business elsewhere. My site is seven weeks old. Those take months, and nobody honest will promise you otherwise.
What the fix does is remove a ceiling. Before, it did not matter how good my pages were, because Bing had not read them. Now it has, and the slower work of earning trust can actually count. That is the right order to do things in: make sure the engines can read you, then give them a reason to rank you.
If you are paying anyone for search work, ask them one question: what does Bing know about my site? If they have to go and look, they have not been looking.
If you want me to look at yours
Send me your URL and I will run the four checks above, plus the ones from what the assistant says about you, and reply with what Bing and the assistants can currently see. No charge. If it is all fine, I will say so.