How to Get Indexed on Bing Fast (and Why It Matters More Than Ever)

Why Bing is worth your attention

Bing's own search share is smaller than Google's, but its index reaches much further than bing.com: it's the foundation of Microsoft Copilot, a key source for ChatGPT Search, and it supplies results to DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Ecosia. A page Bing hasn't indexed is invisible across all of them at once.

Step 1: Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is free. Verify ownership with a DNS record, a meta tag or an uploaded file — or, if the site is already in Google Search Console, use Bing's import option, which brings over verification and your submitted sitemaps in a couple of clicks.

Step 2: Submit a clean sitemap

• List only canonical URLs that return a 200 status and aren't blocked or noindexed — every junk URL wastes crawl attention.
• Keep lastmod dates accurate. Bing has said it relies on them to decide what to recrawl, so dates that change on every build teach it to ignore them.
• Split large sites into multiple sitemaps under a sitemap index — each file is limited to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed.

Step 3: Push new and updated URLs immediately

Waiting for Bing to re-read your sitemap can take days. For a handful of pages, use the URL Submission tool in Bing Webmaster Tools (it shows your daily quota). For anything ongoing, use IndexNow: one notification reaches Bing and every other participating engine — Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep — the moment a page is published or changed.

Step 4: Remove anything that blocks Bingbot

Check robots.txt for rules that disallow Bingbot, look for stray noindex tags, and review any firewall or bot-protection rules — an over-eager block list is a common silent cause. Bing also honours the Crawl-delay directive, so a high value there slows discovery down. Fix server errors and slow responses, since both reduce how much Bing crawls.

How to check Bing has indexed a page

Paste the URL into URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools to see whether it's indexed and why not if it isn't, or search site:yourdomain.com/your-page on Bing for a quick look. Remember that Bing and Google are separate indexes: being in one says nothing about the other.

Why Bing may still skip a page

Discovery isn't the same as indexing. Like Google, Bing leaves out pages it judges thin, duplicated or low-value, and pages with no internal links pointing to them. If a crawled page stays out, improve the content and link to it from pages Bing already visits rather than resubmitting it again and again.