Bing Webmaster Center: where it is now, how to verify a site, and what each report is for
Microsoft's free console for site owners, the five ways to prove you own a site, what every report actually tells you, the ten minute first visit, and how it differs from Google Search Console.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 12 October 2026
The product people mean by Bing Webmaster Center is Microsoft's free console for site owners, and its current name is Bing Webmaster Tools. It lives at bing.com/webmasters, it costs nothing, and it is separate from Microsoft Advertising, which is the paid side. You sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account, add your site, prove you own it, and you get Bing's own data about how it crawls, indexes and ranks your pages. The fastest way in is the Google Search Console import, which verifies your sites automatically instead of making you edit DNS or upload a file. Setup takes about ten minutes and it is worth doing even if Bing sends you a small share of your traffic, because Bing's index feeds several AI assistants as well as Bing itself.
This page covers the free webmaster console: getting in, what each report does, and what to act on. For the paid platform and where Microsoft ads appear, see Microsoft Advertising and Bing. For the Google equivalent, see the Google webmaster tools dashboard.
Getting in and verifying your site
Sign in at bing.com/webmasters, then add your site. Microsoft offers several ways to prove ownership, and the one you pick only affects how long it takes.
- Import from Google Search Console. Click Import, sign in to Google, grant access, and pick your properties. Microsoft's documentation, checked on 10 October 2026, says up to 100 websites can be imported at once and that the selected sites are added and verified automatically. This is the right default. Note that imported verification depends on continued access, so if the Google connection is revoked you reconnect or verify another way.
- Meta tag. Paste a tag into the head of your home page. Easiest on a site where you can edit the template.
- XML file upload. Upload the file Microsoft gives you to your web root.
- DNS record. Add the CNAME record Microsoft gives you. Slowest to propagate, strongest for a whole domain.
- Domain Connect. Available through supported DNS providers and handles the record for you.
Once verified, submit your sitemap. One line in robots.txt pointing at the sitemap, plus a manual submission in the Sitemaps report, is all this needs.
What each report is for
| Report or tool | What it tells you | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Search performance | Clicks, impressions, average click through rate and average position by query and page | Weekly. This is the report you open first |
| URL Inspection | How Bing sees one URL: its indexed version, plus crawl, content, guideline and schema issues | A single page is missing or behaving oddly |
| Site Explorer | Your site as a folder tree, with redirects, crawl problems and robots.txt blocks shown in place | A whole section is underperforming |
| Site Scan | An on demand audit crawl that checks for common technical issues | Monthly, and after any template change |
| Sitemaps | Which sitemaps Bing knows about and what it found in them | After a launch or a migration |
| URL submission and IndexNow | Tells Bing about new and changed URLs for faster discovery, with a history of what you sent | Every publish, ideally automatically |
| Backlinks | Referring pages, referring domains and anchor text, for your site and for a competitor | Monthly, and when planning outreach |
| Keyword research | Query volume and related terms from Bing's own data | Planning pages, as a second source next to your other tools |
| Robots.txt tester and crawl settings | Whether a rule blocks what you think it blocks, and how hard Bing may crawl you | Before and after editing robots.txt |
The reporting area is labelled with both disciplines in the current interface. The feature strings on Microsoft's own about page, checked on 10 October 2026, read SEO/GEO features and SEO/GEO Report, which tells you where Microsoft thinks the work is heading.
The ten minute first visit
- Verify, then submit the sitemap. Nothing else in the account means much until Bing has your URL list.
- Open Search performance and sort by impressions. Queries with impressions and few clicks are title and description work. Queries at positions five to twenty are internal linking work.
- Run Site Scan once. Fix the issues it groups as errors first: broken internal links, missing titles, duplicate descriptions, pages blocked from crawling.
- Inspect your three most important URLs. Confirm each one is indexed and that Bing's stored version matches what you publish.
- Turn on IndexNow. On WordPress there is a Microsoft plugin for URL submission; on other stacks it is a single HTTP call at publish time.
- Check crawl settings. If your server is comfortable, let Bing crawl faster during quiet hours.
IndexNow, and why it matters more than it used to
IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL has been added, updated or deleted, documented at indexnow.org. You host a key file, then send a small request naming the changed URL. Because the protocol is shared rather than Bing specific, one call reaches every participating engine, and Microsoft exposes both the protocol and a URL Submission API inside Webmaster Tools. For a site that publishes often, wiring this into the publish step is a few lines of work that removes the wait for a crawler to come back on its own. Engines still decide what to index on the merits of the page, so the gain here is discovery speed, which is exactly the thing you want on a news post, a price change or a fixed page.
Bing Webmaster Tools next to Google Search Console
They answer the same questions about different indexes, and Microsoft publishes its own side by side comparison on the Bing webmaster blog. Run both. Google tells you about by far the larger share of search traffic for most sites. Bing tells you about an index that reaches Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and the assistants that draw on it, and it hands you two things Google's console does not: backlink data for any domain, including a competitor's, and keyword volume inside the same product. Where the two disagree about whether a page is indexed, treat it as what it is, two engines with separate crawlers and separate judgements, and fix the page for both.
What to do each month
- Open Search performance, compare the last 28 days with the previous 28, and write down the three queries that moved most.
- Run Site Scan and clear the errors.
- Check Sitemaps for a drop in discovered URLs, which is usually the first sign of a template or robots change.
- Review new referring domains in Backlinks, and keep the ones worth building on.
- Inspect any page you have rewritten, to confirm Bing has picked up the new version.
For the wider first ninety days of search work this sits inside, see the beginner guide to your first ninety days.
Asked and answered: Bing Webmaster Center
Is Bing Webmaster Center the same as Bing Webmaster Tools?
Yes, people use Webmaster Center to mean Microsoft's free console for site owners, and the product is now called Bing Webmaster Tools at bing.com/webmasters. If a search for the old name brings you here, that is the place you were looking for.
Does Bing Webmaster Tools cost anything?
No. It is free, and it is a separate product from Microsoft Advertising, which is the paid advertising platform. You can hold one without the other.
Can I import my sites from Google Search Console?
Yes. Microsoft's documentation describes importing up to 100 sites at once from Search Console, with the imported sites added and verified automatically. Because that verification relies on the Google connection staying in place, adding a meta tag or DNS record afterwards is a sensible belt and braces step for sites you care about.
Why does Bing report different numbers from Google?
Two engines, two crawlers, two indexes and two ranking systems, so two sets of numbers. Read each console against itself over time rather than against the other, and treat a page that one engine has indexed and the other has not as a page worth inspecting in both.
Does submitting a URL get it indexed?
Submission is how you get a page looked at quickly. Whether it is stored and shown still depends on the page being worth indexing, so submit the URL and make the page the best answer to the query it targets. Done together, those two steps are what gets a new page into results fast.
Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth the setup if Bing sends me little traffic?
Yes, for two reasons beyond Bing traffic itself. The backlink and keyword data is free and covers domains other than your own, and Bing's index is one of the sources several AI assistants read when they answer a question, so being crawled cleanly by Bing reaches further than the Bing results page.
The reader that does not send a click
Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools both describe visits from results pages. A buyer who asks an assistant for a recommendation may read about your business and never appear in either report, because the answer was written from your pages, your listings and other people's mentions without a click. Crawl and indexing health still matter, since an unindexed page cannot be used by anyone. Add one more check to the monthly routine: ask your category questions in an assistant and read who it names. AI Knows Us measures exactly that across the five main assistants.