Almost every Indian marketing team has Google Search Console open daily and has never signed into Bing Webmaster Tools. The usual reasoning is that Bing’s share of search here is small enough to ignore.
That reasoning was defensible when Bing was only a search engine. It is weaker now, because Microsoft Copilot is grounded in Bing’s index, and several other products draw on Bing data in one form or another. If you care about appearing in assistant answers, you have an interest in how Bing sees your site, regardless of how much direct traffic it sends.
There is also a less strategic reason. The tool gives you several things free that cost money elsewhere.
This is about the tool and its data. The question of how to appear in the answers themselves is covered separately in appearing in Microsoft Copilot answers.
Setting it up takes ten minutes
You can verify ownership in the usual ways, with a file, a meta tag or a DNS record. You can also import your sites and verification directly from Google Search Console, which is the fastest route and the one most people do not realise exists.
Submit your sitemap. If you already run sitemaps for Google, it is the same file.
That is the whole setup. The reason people have not done it is not difficulty, it is that nobody suggested it.
What it gives you that Google does not
Backlink data, free. Bing shows referring domains and inbound links to your site, and will let you compare against other domains. This is the single strongest reason for a small team to sign in, because the equivalent elsewhere is a paid subscription. It will not be complete, no backlink index is, and it is considerably better than nothing.
Generous URL submission. You can submit URLs directly for crawling, with a daily allowance far larger than the handful of manual requests Google permits. For a new site struggling to get crawled at all, this is a real lever rather than a token one.
Crawl control. You can tell Bingbot how hard to crawl you, by hour of day. If your server is under pressure during business hours, you can shift crawl activity to the night rather than blocking it. Google offers nothing comparable in a usable form.
Index Explorer. A directory-level view of what has been crawled and indexed across your site, which makes structural problems visible in a way a URL-by-URL tool does not. Whole sections that were never crawled show up immediately.
On-page diagnostics. Bing will tell you plainly about missing titles, duplicate descriptions, missing alt text, thin pages and markup errors. Google stopped offering this kind of basic site hygiene reporting years ago.
Keyword research and query data. Based on Bing’s own data, which is a smaller sample and an independent one. A second opinion is worth something even when the first is larger.
IndexNow lives here
IndexNow lets you notify participating search engines the moment a URL is published, updated or deleted, instead of waiting to be crawled. Bing is the main operator of it and Bing Webmaster Tools is where you manage the key and see whether submissions are being accepted.
For a site that publishes frequently, this is the difference between content being noticed within minutes and within days, on the engines that participate. It is a small implementation, and the setup for common stacks is in setting up IndexNow on Next.js and Laravel sites.
One honest limit. Google does not participate, so this does not solve a Google indexing problem. Treat it as improving your position with Bing and the assistants built on it, and read getting new pages discovered and indexed quickly for the broader question.
The diagnostics worth running in your first session
- Index Explorer, by directory. Look for sections of your site with far fewer indexed URLs than you expect. This finds structural problems quickly.
- The crawl information report. Look for 4xx and 5xx codes, redirects and anything blocked. Bing often surfaces these more plainly than Google does.
- The on-page report. Missing and duplicate titles and descriptions across the whole site, in one list. Most sites have more of these than anybody believed.
- Backlinks. Both what you have and what a competitor has. This is the free competitive data.
- URL inspection on three important pages. Check what Bing actually holds for them, which can differ from Google in instructive ways.
- Robots.txt tester. Confirm you are not blocking Bingbot, which happens more often than people think, usually inherited from a copied robots file.
That last one deserves emphasis. A robots.txt assembled from a template, or a firewall rule written to block scrapers, frequently blocks Bingbot. If Bingbot cannot read your site, neither can anything grounded in Bing’s index. The same question applies to other assistant crawlers, and you can test it with the method in checking whether AI crawlers can access your site.
Where Bing genuinely differs
Be careful here, because a great deal of folklore circulates about Bing’s ranking preferences and most of it is unverified.
What is reasonable to say is that Bing is a separate index with separate crawling, which means pages can be present in one and absent from the other. That asymmetry is the practically useful fact. If a page is missing from Bing but present in Google, that is diagnostic information about crawling and access rather than about content quality.
Bing also publishes its own guidelines, and they are worth reading once rather than inferring its preferences from commentary.
What is not worth doing is building a separate optimisation strategy for Bing. The work that makes a page retrievable, clearly structured and accurately marked up serves both.
Bing Places is a separate thing
Worth knowing if you are a local business. Bing Places is the local listing product, distinct from Webmaster Tools, and it can import from your Google Business Profile.
For most Indian local businesses the return on maintaining it is modest in direct traffic. It becomes more interesting when you consider that assistants answering local questions draw on structured local data from more than one provider, and an absent or wrong listing is a gap you did not know you had.
Set it up once by importing, check the details are correct, and review it twice a year. That is proportionate.
What is a waste of effort
Chasing Bing rankings as a goal. Direct traffic from Bing in India will remain small, and optimising specifically for it is a poor use of attention.
Treating the on-page suggestions as a checklist to clear completely. They are generic and some of them are noise. Use them to find real problems, not to reach a score.
Submitting your whole site through URL submission because the quota allows it. It is for pages that matter or that have changed, not for bulk notification.
Assuming Bing data describes Google. They are independent indexes. Use Bing’s data to understand Bing, and treat agreement between the two as more meaningful than either alone.
Why this is worth an hour
The argument is not that Bing matters as a search engine in India. It is that an index you are absent from is an assistant you cannot be cited by, and the cost of finding out is one sign-in and one sitemap submission.
For most sites the session produces two or three genuine findings: a section that was never crawled, a set of duplicate titles nobody had listed, or a robots rule blocking a crawler. Those findings are worth having regardless of which engine surfaced them.
A sensible order of work
- Verify the site, importing from Search Console if you can.
- Submit your sitemap and confirm it is being read.
- Run the robots.txt tester and confirm Bingbot is allowed.
- Work through Index Explorer by directory and note anything under-indexed.
- Export the on-page report and fix the genuine duplicates and omissions.
- Look at the backlink report, including a competitor.
- Set up IndexNow if you publish or update frequently.
- Set a quarterly reminder rather than a daily habit. This is not a dashboard to watch.
If you want this run across your site alongside a proper Search Console review, get in touch.