How to index a site on Bing: verification, sitemaps, URL submission and IndexNow

To get a site indexed on Bing, do four things in order: verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap there, submit your most important URLs directly with the URL submission tool, and then wire up IndexNow so every future publish or update pings the engine the moment it happens. The whole sequence takes about half an hour on a site that is already crawlable, and the one shortcut worth knowing is that Bing Webmaster Tools can import a site you have already verified in Google Search Console, which removes the verification step entirely. This page walks through each step, then the reasons a page stays out of the index after you have done them.

Step 1: verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools

Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in. You are offered two routes. The import route pulls your properties straight from Google Search Console and verifies them, which is the quickest option if you already have the site there. The manual route gives you three choices: an XML file uploaded to the site root, a meta tag in the home page head, or a CNAME record in DNS. DNS is the most durable of the three, because it survives a site rebuild that would wipe a file or a tag.

Verify the exact version of the site you want reported on, including the protocol and whether you use www. Verifying the wrong variant is why a dashboard sometimes shows nothing at all.

Step 2: submit the sitemap

In the Sitemaps section, submit the full URL of your sitemap, for example https://example.com/sitemap.xml. Bing's own sitemap help covers the accepted formats, and the same file you already give Google works here.

Three things make a sitemap useful rather than decorative. It should contain only URLs you want indexed, with no redirects, no error pages and no pages blocked in robots.txt. The lastmod date should be real, because an engine that learns your dates are meaningless stops using them for prioritisation. And on a large site, split it into several sitemaps grouped by section with an index file, so the reporting tells you which section has the problem.

Also reference the sitemap from robots.txt with a Sitemap line, since that is read by every crawler that fetches the file rather than only by the one you submitted it to.

Step 3: submit your key URLs directly

Bing Webmaster Tools includes a URL submission tool that pushes individual URLs into the crawl queue. There is a submission allowance per site, refreshed on a cycle, so spend it on the pages that matter: the home page, the main service or category pages, and anything newly published or substantially changed. Do not spend it on an entire archive. The sitemap handles discovery at scale; direct submission handles urgency.

The same section lets you inspect a single URL and see whether Bing has it, when it last crawled it, and what it found, which is the fastest way to tell an indexing problem from a ranking one.

Step 4: wire up IndexNow so it happens automatically

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL has been added, changed or deleted. Read on 10 October 2026, indexnow.org describes it as "a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted" and states that the protocol "has support from Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, Yep". One integration therefore covers several engines at once.

Setting it up takes three steps, and the protocol documentation has the exact request format.

1. Generate a key and host it as a text file at the site root, so the engine can confirm the key belongs to you.
2. Send a request containing the changed URL whenever content changes. Most content management systems have a plugin or an extension that does this on publish, and if yours does not, it is a few lines in your deploy script.
3. Send URLs only when something actually changed. Pinging unchanged pages on a schedule wastes the signal, and the point of the protocol is that the ping means something.

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "example.com",
  "key": "your-key-here",
  "keyLocation": "https://example.com/your-key-here.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://example.com/new-page",
    "https://example.com/updated-page"
  ]
}

Why the half hour is worth it

Bing's index does not only serve bing.com. Microsoft's own assistant products are built on it, and several other search front ends source their web results from it rather than crawling independently. That means a site missing from Bing's index is missing from more places than its Bing traffic share suggests, and the traffic share is the number most people use to decide not to bother.

The other reason is diagnostic. Bing Webmaster Tools reports its own crawl errors, its own query data and its own site scan, free, on a site you have already verified. Two engines reporting on the same site catch problems that one engine's reporting misses.

If a page still is not indexed

• robots.txt blocks it. Check the rules that apply to bingbot specifically, not only the wildcard group.
• A noindex tag or header is present. Fetch the page as a crawler would and read the response headers as well as the HTML.
• The canonical points elsewhere. A page whose canonical names a different URL is asking to be dropped in favour of that URL.
• Nothing links to it. A URL that appears only in the sitemap and nowhere in the site's own navigation gets treated as low priority. Link it from a relevant page.
• The content is a near duplicate of a page already indexed. Merge them, and redirect the weaker URL.
• The page needs JavaScript to show its content. Serve the main text in the HTML response.
• The server was slow or erroring when the crawler came. Check your logs for the crawler's visits and the status codes it received.

Bing's webmaster guidelines set out what the engine asks for, and they are short enough to read in one sitting.

This page covers getting a site into Bing's index. For the advertising platform, which is a separate product, see Microsoft Advertising and Bing. For the three stages a page passes through before it can rank anywhere, see how search engines work. For the Google side of the same job, see the Search Console dashboard guide.

index a site on Bing: the parts people ask about twice

How long does Bing take to index a new site?

A verified site with a submitted sitemap is usually crawled within days, and direct URL submission plus IndexNow shortens it to hours for the pages you push. A brand new domain with no inbound links takes longer than an established one.

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes. Verification, sitemaps, URL submission, query reporting and the site scan are all included.

Do I need IndexNow if I already submit a sitemap?

Use both. The sitemap is the complete list for discovery, and IndexNow is the instant notification that something changed. Together they cover both jobs.

Does being indexed on Google mean I am indexed on Bing?

No. The two engines crawl and index independently, which is why plenty of sites rank well on one and are thin on the other. Verify both and check both.

Can I import everything from Google Search Console?

You can import and verify your properties, which saves the verification step. The reporting history and the query data stay separate, because each engine reports its own.

How many URLs should I submit by hand?

Only the ones with a reason: new, changed, or commercially important. Keep the rest to the sitemap and the automatic ping.

Bing's index also feeds answers you never see ranked

Verification, sitemaps and IndexNow get a page into Bing. What an assistant then says about that page is a separate matter, and no Bing report shows it.

The practical step is to ask. Put the question your page answers to a few assistants and note whether your site is named, paraphrased or absent. AI Knows Us makes that comparison across several assistants in one pass, so you can set it beside what Bing Webmaster Tools reports about the same URLs.