Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow so ChatGPT and Copilot can find and cite your pages.
Bing Webmaster Tools for AI search gives you a direct view into how Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries cite your pages, and it shows whether Bing has indexed the pages ChatGPT may draw from. Most B2B teams verify Google Search Console on day one and never open Bing's version. That leaves a blind spot on one of the indexes feeding AI answers.
This guide walks through the setup, the new AI Performance report, IndexNow, and the fixes that get pages into Bing's index. You'll finish with a 30-day plan you can run this month.
Bing counts because Copilot runs on it and ChatGPT's search feature leans on Bing results for a large share of its citations. If Bing hasn't indexed a page, you lose that page in at least one major AI product before the answer is even written.
Microsoft built the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools to count citations in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. Microsoft announced it on February 10, 2026, as a public preview. The company doesn't name the partners.
Bing is not the only source. Grow and Convert's fan-out study found that about 40% of ChatGPT sources for the fan-out queries it tracked came from Google or Bing results, and the rest came from model memory and platform sources such as Reddit and YouTube transcripts. The study doesn't publish a sample size. Treat Bing as one input you can control, not the whole pipeline. Our guide to query fan-out optimization covers the other inputs.
Seer Interactive found that more than 87% of ChatGPT search citations matched a page in Bing's top 20 results for the same question. Only 56% matched Google's results, with a median Google rank of 17.
Christina Blake and Alisa Scharf published the study on February 6, 2025. They reused ChatGPT answers that triggered a web search, ran the same questions in Google and Bing, and matched citations to result links. The sample was 500+ citations from about 100 questions, and the authors call the findings directional.
Two details change how you use this. Most matches sat in the top 10, but many fell in positions 11 to 20, so a page-two ranking in Bing still counts. And ChatGPT often rewrites a long question into a shorter search, so the Bing query you need to rank for may be shorter than the prompt a buyer typed.
Monitor your progress with Nobori. Nobori tracks which of your pages ChatGPT cites, so you can compare it with your Bing rankings for the same questions.
Create a free Bing Webmaster Tools account, add your site, and verify it. The fastest route is importing a verified site from Google Search Console, which brings over your sitemaps and ownership in one step.
Bing's import supports up to 100 Search Console sites at once, and manual verification offers four methods, according to an October 2026 setup guide from eSEOspace. Bing data usually appears about 48 hours after you add a site. Verify every domain and subdomain you publish on, including the one that hosts your blog.
After verification, do three things on day one. Submit your XML sitemap. Open the URL Inspection tool and test your five highest-value pages: pricing, your main product page, your top comparison page, your best guide, and your about page. Then open the Sitemaps and Index reports and note how many URLs Bing has discovered against how many it has indexed.
That gap is your starting number. A site with 400 published URLs and 150 indexed in Bing has 250 pages that cannot appear in a Bing-sourced answer.
The AI Performance report shows how often Microsoft's AI surfaces cite your pages and which phrases they used to find them. It has five core metrics: Total Citations, Average Cited Pages, Grounding Queries, Page-Level Citation Activity, and Visibility Trends Over Time.
Total Citations counts how many times your content appeared as a source in AI answers during the date range you choose. Average Cited Pages is the daily average of unique pages cited. Grounding queries are the phrases the AI used to retrieve your content, and Microsoft says they're a sample of overall citation activity. A June 2026 update, as reported by eSEOspace, added Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare views.
Read the limits before you report numbers. Microsoft states that citations don't show where a page appears in an answer, and the report doesn't measure traffic, clicks, or engagement. Page-level counts show how often a page is cited, not how important it is to the answer.
Use the grounding queries as a prompt source. They tell you the exact search phrases Copilot used when it picked your page, which are the phrases you should test in your own tracking.
Monitor your progress with Nobori. Add the grounding queries to your Nobori prompt set and see whether the same pages win in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
IndexNow lets you tell participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated, or deleted, so you don't wait for a crawler to find the change. You send one submission and the participating engines share it.
The IndexNow FAQ lists the global endpoint, Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, and Yep as participants. Google isn't on the list, so IndexNow won't speed up Google. It speeds up Bing, which is the index you're targeting here.
Know what it doesn't do. IndexNow states that submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing, and a 200 response only confirms that the engine received your URL. Pages still need to pass Bing's quality checks. For fresh pages and for pages whose prices, features, or dates changed, a ping beats waiting.
The protocol has two limits worth memorizing. You can submit up to 10,000 URLs per request, and you should avoid resubmitting the same URL many times a day unless the content changed.
Generate a key, host it as a text file on your site, and send a request whenever a page changes. Many CMS platforms and CDNs handle all three, so check your stack first.
WordPress, Shopify, and Wix support IndexNow natively or through a plugin, and Cloudflare users can turn on Crawler Hints, according to eSEOspace. If you publish on a custom stack or Webflow, use the manual route:
yourkey.txt) in your site root, with the key as its only content.Trigger the ping from your publish workflow, not by hand. One line in your deploy script or a webhook from your CMS covers every future article.
Monitor your progress with Nobori. Publish a page, ping IndexNow, and watch for the first citation in Nobori's daily runs. That gives you your own time-to-citation baseline.
Four problems cause most Bing indexing gaps: blocked crawlers, content hidden behind JavaScript, thin or duplicate pages, and stale sitemaps. Bing Webmaster Tools flags each one if you check.
First, check your robots.txt. A rule that blocks Bingbot removes you from Copilot and from Bing-sourced ChatGPT answers. Our robots.txt guide for AI crawlers shows how to separate training bots from search bots.
Second, test whether your key content appears in raw HTML. Content that loads only after JavaScript runs is invisible to many fetchers, as we show in our JavaScript rendering guide.
Third, look at the "discovered but not indexed" pattern in the Index reports. Bing skips pages it judges thin, near-duplicate, or low value. Merge or improve them.
Fourth, keep your sitemap accurate. List only canonical, indexable URLs, and update the lastmod value only when the content changes. A sitemap full of redirects and noindex pages teaches Bing to distrust it.
Track the short search-style versions of your buyer prompts in Bing, and check where your pages sit in the top 20. Seer's data suggests page two still counts toward a ChatGPT citation.
Start with 30 to 50 prompts across problem, comparison, and vendor-selection questions. For each prompt, write two or three shorter variants that sound like a search box entry, since ChatGPT often shortens long questions. Run each variant in Bing and record which of your URLs appear in positions 1 to 20, and which competitors appear.
Then sort the results into three groups. Pages that rank in the top 20 and get cited need protection: keep them fresh. Pages that rank and don't get cited need better structure and tighter lead answers. Prompts where you don't rank need new or improved content.
The answer from one engine does not carry over to another. Our cross-engine overlap analysis found that most cited domains appear in only one engine, so keep Bing work separate from your Google reporting.
Spend week one on setup, week two on indexing fixes, week three on automation, and week four on measurement. Each week has one owner and one deliverable.
Keep the prompt set fixed across the 30 days so the changes mean something. Report three numbers: indexed pages in Bing, Bing citations from the AI Performance report, and citations in the other engines you track. Our breakdown of AI mentions versus citations explains why to keep those two metrics apart.
Bing Webmaster Tools tells you what Microsoft's AI surfaces cited. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews. Nobori covers those five engines with daily runs of your buyer prompts, so you see the citations Bing's report can't show.
Use Nobori to build the prompt set in step four, then compare it with your Bing top-20 check. When a page ranks in Bing and isn't cited in ChatGPT, that page goes to the top of your fix list. When a competitor wins the prompt, Nobori shows which source the engine cited, so you know what to match.
After you ship IndexNow, Nobori's daily tracking shows how many days pass between publishing a page and its first citation. You can repeat that test on each new article and watch the number move.
See if AI engines are citing you → nobori.ai
Sources: Seer Interactive, "87% of SearchGPT Citations Match Bing's Top Results" (February 6, 2025); Microsoft Bing Webmaster Blog, "Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview" (February 10, 2026); IndexNow FAQ (indexnow.org); eSEOspace, "Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow for AI Search" (October 13, 2026); Grow and Convert, fan-out query SERP study (2026).