Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free service that shows a website owner how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks their site, and lets them submit sitemaps, request indexing and spot problems. It is Bing’s counterpart to Google Search Console.
How Bing Webmaster Tools works
You add your site and prove you own it. The quickest route is importing a site you have already verified in Google Search Console, which brings across the property and sitemaps in one step. Otherwise you can verify with a meta tag, an XML file uploaded to the server or a DNS record.
Once verified, the main reports cover search performance (clicks, impressions and average position for the queries that show your pages), URL inspection for a single page, a site-wide scan that flags common on-page problems, a backlinks report, and a keyword research tool built on Bing’s own search data. You can submit an XML sitemap, check how Bingbot is crawling, and adjust crawl timing if the crawler is putting a strain on your server.
Bing also backs IndexNow, a protocol that lets your site notify search engines the moment a page is added, changed or deleted. Many WordPress SEO plugins and content platforms can send these notifications automatically, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows the submissions it has received.
Why it matters
Bing’s share of UK searches is smaller than Google’s, but its index reaches further than bing.com. At the time of writing (October 2026), Bing’s results feed Microsoft Copilot, the search box built into Windows and the Edge browser, and other search products that have drawn wholly or partly on Bing’s index, such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. AI assistants that search the web also need a source index, and Bing has been one such source. A page that Bing cannot crawl or has not indexed can be missing from all of these at once.
The audience matters too. Bing is the default on many work laptops running Windows and Edge, so for B2B firms, professional services and anyone selling to office-based buyers in the UK, the people searching on Bing can be exactly the right ones. It is also a free second opinion on technical health: Bing sometimes reports crawl errors or indexing gaps that are worth checking in Google too.
Common mistakes
- Never setting it up, on the assumption that Google is all that counts. It takes a few minutes if Search Console is already verified.
- Blocking Bingbot by accident in robots.txt or a firewall rule written with only Googlebot in mind.
- Submitting a sitemap once and never looking again, so errors such as redirected or noindexed URLs in the sitemap go unnoticed.
- Treating its SEO scan as a to-do list. Some flags are minor or do not apply to your site; judge each one.
How to act on it
Sign in with a Microsoft account, import your property from Google Search Console, and confirm your sitemap is listed and processed. Check the indexed page count against the number of pages you want found. If it is far lower, inspect a few missing URLs to see why.
Turn on IndexNow through your CMS or SEO plugin if it supports it, then look at the performance report once a month alongside Search Console. Differences in the queries each engine shows you can reveal searches you had not considered. Checking both consoles is part of every technical SEO review I carry out, because a crawl or indexing problem often shows up in one before the other.