Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow for AI search: what's confirmed and what isn't

Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow are worth setting up for AI search for one well-documented reason: Microsoft Copilot runs on the Bing index. Microsoft's webmaster guidelines say "Bing and Copilot search experiences rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search." If Bing can't find, render and index a page, it may not be available for Copilot to cite.

Bing Webmaster Tools is the free dashboard where you verify your site, submit sitemaps and, since February 2026, see an AI Performance report showing how often your pages are cited in Copilot, Bing's AI-generated summaries and select partner integrations. IndexNow is a simple protocol that lets your site tell Bing and other participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or removed.

What is not confirmed is the claim you will often read next: that Bing indexing or IndexNow gets you into ChatGPT. OpenAI does not name Bing as its search provider, and no first-party source says IndexNow affects ChatGPT.

What's confirmed and what isn't

How Copilot uses the Bing index

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Guidelines describe "how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates, and surfaces content across Bing search experiences, Copilot, and grounding API results." Grounding is Microsoft's term for "the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response."

The guidelines draw a direct line from ordinary SEO to AI answers: "SEO best practices that support discovery, indexing accuracy, and content clarity also support eligibility for AI-generated experiences, grounding results, and citations." There is no separate Copilot crawler in Bing's crawler list. The work is done by Bingbot.

Microsoft lists four discovery signals: IndexNow URL submission, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links, and external links from relevant websites. It also lists things to avoid, including "hiding critical content behind client-side rendering" and blocking Bingbot in your robots.txt file. In its words, "Content that cannot be reliably rendered may not be indexed or selected for grounding results."

Microsoft does not publish a formula for which indexed page gets cited. A Microsoft Advertising post from October 2025 says as much: "While there's no secret strategy for being selected by AI systems, success starts with content that is fresh, authoritative, structured, and semantically clear." For the content side, see our guide to ranking in Bing Copilot.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing's getting started checklist has four steps: open an account, add and verify your site, add sitemaps, and create a search optimization plan. Bing says the first two get you running and the last two are "optional, but highly recommended."

1. Open a free account. You can sign up with an existing Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
2. Import from Google Search Console if you can. If you have a verified Search Console account, Bing can import your sites and they are verified automatically. You can import up to 100 websites at once.
3. Or verify manually. Bing offers four methods: DNS auto verification, an XML file named BingSiteAuth.xml, a meta tag, or a CNAME record added to DNS.
4. Submit your sitemap. Bing supports XML sitemaps and sitemap index files. Add them in the Sitemaps section.
5. Wait for data. Bing says it usually takes 48 hours after a site is added for analytics and data to be generated.

For sitemaps, Bing's guidelines ask you to list only canonical URLs and to include freshness signals such as lastmod where applicable. They also say plainly that "Sitemaps do not guarantee visibility."

Read the AI Performance report

Microsoft announced AI Performance on February 10, 2026 as a public preview and called it "an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools." The AI Performance help page defines the metrics.

Microsoft states the limits clearly.

• Citations are not traffic. "A citation indicates that your content was visibly referenced or shown in an AI-generated answer. It does not represent traffic, clicks, or user engagement."
• It is not a ranking report. "AI Performance does not measure rankings, authority, performance, or importance."
• The data is a sample. Microsoft says it "represents a sample of overall citation activity." It is refreshed daily with a short processing delay.
• Grounding queries are not prompts. Microsoft says "they are not full user questions or prompts." They are the phrases the system searched with. Our guide to query fan-out explains why those differ from what the person typed.
• Citation Share has no competitor names. It "does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content."

You can view 7 days, 30 days, 3 months or a custom range, and export to CSV or Excel. A sensible routine is to export once a month and compare with the previous period. How this fits into wider reporting is covered in how to measure GEO performance.

What IndexNow is

IndexNow is a protocol for telling search engines that a URL has changed, so they don't have to discover the change by crawling. In the words of the IndexNow documentation, you submit "a URL of your website which has been added, updated, or deleted."

The key design feature is sharing: "Search engines adopting the IndexNow protocol agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines." You submit to one endpoint only. As of October 2026, IndexNow's published participant list contains Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive and Amazon.

IndexNow also documents what it does not do.

• "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing." The engine decides whether to crawl "based on its crawl quota, scheduling logic, and quality signals."
• A 200 response "only indicates that the search engine has received your URL."
• "Every URL submitted through IndexNow counts toward your site's crawl quota."
• It "is not designed for submitting every URL on your site at once." After a migration or redesign, submitting all URLs is acceptable. For ongoing discovery, IndexNow says to use an XML sitemap as well.

Set up IndexNow

The easy route: your CMS or CDN

Check this first, because you may not need to touch a key file. IndexNow's FAQ lists platforms with native or plugin support, including WordPress, Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, Duda, Joomla!, Drupal and PrestaShop. For WordPress, Bing's IndexNow page lists the IndexNow plugin, Yoast, RankMath, AIOSEO and SEOPress. Cloudflare offers a native integration: Bing's instruction is to enable Crawler Hints in your Cloudflare account.

The manual route

1. Generate a key. It must be 8 to 128 characters, using only letters, numbers and dashes.
2. Host the key file. Create a UTF-8 text file named after the key, containing the key, and place it at the root of your site.
3. Submit URLs. For a single URL, call the endpoint with the changed URL and your key. For many, send a JSON POST. You can submit up to 10,000 URLs per post.
4. Check receipt. Bing says submission activity can be monitored in Bing Webmaster Tools under the IndexNow tab.

A single-URL submission looks like this, using Bing's endpoint and a made-up key. The page URL is URL-encoded, as the documentation requires:

https://www.bing.com/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Fnew-page%2F&key=abc123def456

A 200 or 202 response means the URL was received. A 403 means the key is not valid, a 422 means the URLs don't belong to the host or the key doesn't match, and a 429 means too many requests.

Good habits

• Submit only when something has changed. IndexNow's FAQ says to wait at least 5 minutes between updates before resubmitting the same URL.
• Submit removals too. IndexNow says you should submit redirected URLs and pages that return 404 or 410.
• Prefer submissions as changes happen. Bing's guidelines say streaming submissions "provide faster updates" than batches.

Controls for Copilot

Microsoft does not document a separate robots.txt token for Copilot. Control is through page-level directives, described in the Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

If you want to be cited, check that none of these is set by accident. For local businesses, Microsoft also recommends registering with Bing Places for Business so that address, hours and contact details stay current. The full list of bots and tokens across vendors is in our guide to AI crawlers and robots.txt.

What about ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity?

This is where claims run ahead of the evidence, so here is what each vendor has published.

ChatGPT

OpenAI's help center says "ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers." The article never states which companies they are. Where it tells users to review those providers' privacy policies, it links Microsoft's privacy statement and Shopify's privacy policy. OpenAI's help center and crawler documentation do not say it uses Bing, do not mention IndexNow, and do not say Bing indexing affects ChatGPT answers.

OpenAI's stated eligibility requirement is about its own crawler: "allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site" and confirm your host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI's published IP addresses. It adds that "Placement is not guaranteed." So the documented step for ChatGPT is crawler access. Bing indexing is a reasonable hygiene step that costs little, but calling it a ChatGPT ranking input would be a guess. See also where ChatGPT gets its sources.

Claude, Perplexity and Google

Anthropic's published subprocessor list names Brave Search for web search, and Anthropic runs its own search crawler, Claude-SearchBot. Perplexity runs its own crawler, PerplexityBot, and recommends allowing it. Neither company's crawler documentation mentions IndexNow. Google is not on the IndexNow participant list; its AI features have their own Search Console report and controls, covered in our guide to Google AI Mode.

Conclusion

Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow are free, quick to set up and backed by clear documentation for what they affect: Bing search, Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. They also give you one of the few first-party reports on AI citations. Set them up for those reasons. Don't set them up because someone told you they are the secret door into ChatGPT, since OpenAI has published nothing that says so. If you would like help checking how your site looks to Bing and the other AI crawlers, request a free GEO audit. More guides are in our GEO and AEO Guide.

Frequently asked questions