Bing Webmaster Tools: The Complete Guide to Setup, Sitemaps, Index Coverage & IndexNow

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free platform for monitoring and improving how your website performs in Bing search — the Bing webmaster equivalent of Google Search Console. It shows you which queries bring impressions and clicks, which pages Bing has indexed (and why others were left out), lets you submit sitemaps and individual URLs, runs on-demand site audits, and includes genuinely useful extras Google doesn't offer, like built-in keyword research and IndexNow instant indexing. This guide walks through the full setup, then answers the questions site owners actually search for: how to submit a sitemap, how to read Bing's index coverage data, and what happened to the disavow links tool.

What Is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools (often shortened to Bing WMT) is a free web service at bing.com/webmasters where site owners verify ownership of their domains and get direct access to Bing's view of their site. Its core surfaces:

• Search Performance — clicks, impressions, average CTR, and average position for your queries and pages in Bing results, with up to six months of history.
• URL Inspection — a per-URL diagnostic showing whether a page is indexed, how Bing crawled it, and any indexing issues it found.
• Site Explorer — a folder-tree view of every URL Bing knows about on your site, with index status for each. This is Bing's answer to an index coverage report, and we'll unpack it below.
• Sitemaps and URL Submission — tell Bing what to crawl instead of waiting to be discovered.
• Site Scan — a crawl-based technical SEO audit that flags broken links, missing metadata, oversized pages, and other on-page problems.
• Keyword Research — search volume and related-query data straight from Bing's index, free, without needing a separate paid tool.
• Backlinks — your inbound link profile as Bing sees it, including a comparison view against competitor domains.

Everything is free with a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook login, and one account can manage any number of websites.

Why Bing Webmaster Matters More Than Its Market Share Suggests

Bing's share of classic web search is far smaller than Google's, but writing it off is a mistake in 2026 for three concrete reasons:

1. Bing powers more than Bing. Yahoo Search, DuckDuckGo (in part), and the search experiences inside Windows all draw on Bing's index. Ranking in Bing means ranking in an ecosystem, not one engine.
2. AI assistants read Bing's index. Microsoft Copilot is built directly on Bing, and several AI search products use Bing's index and APIs for web grounding. If your pages aren't indexed by Bing, you're invisible to a growing slice of AI-generated answers — an answer-engine-optimization problem, not just an SEO one.
3. The audience skews valuable. Bing's desktop-heavy user base — default-browser Edge users, corporate Windows environments, older and higher-income demographics — converts well in many B2B and finance niches. Less competition for that traffic makes it cheap to win.

For markets like Italy, Germany, and Japan, where Windows desktop usage in businesses remains high, Bing traffic is routinely underpriced relative to the effort required to capture it.

How to Set Up and Verify Your Site

Setup takes ten minutes. You'll need to prove you control the domain:

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account.
2. The shortcut most people should use: if your site is already verified in Google Search Console, choose Import from GSC. Bing reads your verified GSC properties (with your permission) and verifies them in one click — sitemaps included. No DNS edits, no files.
3. Otherwise, click Add a site, enter your URL, and pick one of three manual verification methods:

• XML file — download `BingSiteAuth.xml` and upload it to your site root.
• Meta tag — paste the `` tag into your homepage ``. Most CMSs and SEO plugins have a field for exactly this.
• CNAME record — add a DNS CNAME pointing to `verify.bing.com`. This is the most durable option because it survives site redesigns and theme changes; some DNS providers support Bing's Domain Connect flow, which automates it.

1. Click Verify. Once the dashboard opens, submit your sitemap (next section) and give Bing a few days to populate performance data.

Keep the verification in place permanently — removing the tag, file, or DNS record eventually un-verifies the site.

How to Submit a Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools

Submitting a sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools takes under a minute: open Sitemaps in the left navigation, click Submit sitemap, enter the full sitemap URL (for example `https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml`), and click Submit. Bing fetches it within moments and reports the URL count and any processing errors on the same screen.

Details that trip people up:

• Use the absolute URL, including protocol — `https://example.com/sitemap.xml`, not `/sitemap.xml`.
• Sitemap index files are fine. If your platform generates a sitemap index that references child sitemaps (as WordPress, Shopify, and most frameworks do), submit just the index; Bing follows it to the children automatically.
• Reference the sitemap in robots.txt too (`Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml`). Bing discovers and periodically re-fetches sitemaps declared there even without manual submission — belt and braces.
• Don't resubmit on every content change. Bing re-crawls submitted sitemaps on its own schedule. For urgent individual URLs, use URL Submission or IndexNow instead — that's what they're for.
• Check the status column. "Success" with a plausible URL count means you're done. Errors here are usually malformed XML, a sitemap blocked by robots.txt, or URLs that redirect — fix the source and resubmit once.

If you'd rather never think about sitemaps, indexing pings, or submission quotas again, this entire workflow is the kind of thing SEO automation platforms handle for you on every publish.

Bing Index Coverage Report Explained

Bing doesn't have a page literally titled "index coverage report" the way Google Search Console does — its index coverage story is split across Site Explorer and URL Inspection, and understanding both gives you the same (and in some ways better) visibility.

Site Explorer is the closest thing to a full coverage report. It presents your site as a browsable folder tree, exactly as Bing's crawler understands your URL structure. For each folder and URL you can see whether it's indexed, filter by status, and spot entire sections of your site that Bing is ignoring. The key filters:

• Indexed URLs — in Bing's index and eligible to appear in results.
• Crawled but not indexed — Bing fetched the page and chose not to index it. The usual suspects: thin or duplicated content, soft-404s, near-identical variants, or simply low perceived value. This is the status that deserves most of your attention.
• Crawl errors — Bing couldn't fetch the page (404s, 5xx errors, timeouts, DNS problems).
• Excluded — blocked by robots.txt, carrying a `noindex` directive, redirecting elsewhere, or canonicalized to a different URL.

URL Inspection is the per-page microscope: paste any URL and Bing reports its index status, the last crawl date, discovered canonical, and specific indexing or markup issues. Use Site Explorer to find problem clusters, then URL Inspection to diagnose individual pages.

How to act on coverage data, by status:

Status	What it means	What to do
Indexed	Page can rank	Nothing — monitor in Search Performance
Crawled but not indexed	Quality/duplication judgment	Improve content depth, consolidate duplicates, strengthen internal links
Crawl error	Fetch failed	Fix the 404/5xx, then request re-crawl via URL Submission
Excluded by noindex/robots	You (or your CMS) told Bing to skip it	Verify it's intentional — accidental sitewide noindex is a classic launch bug
Redirect/canonical elsewhere	Another URL gets the credit	Confirm the target is the URL you actually want ranking

A practical workflow: run a coverage review monthly, compare indexed-page counts against your sitemap URL count, and investigate any widening gap. If you want the same diagnosis run automatically — crawlability, indexability, metadata, and structured data in one pass — our free SEO audit checks the on-page half of that equation in about a minute.

How to Disavow Links in Bing Webmaster Tools

Here's the straight answer: you can't anymore — Bing removed the Disavow Links tool. Bing Webmaster Tools offered a disavow feature for years, but Microsoft retired it (the removal was announced in late 2023), stating that Bing's systems had become good enough at identifying and simply ignoring spammy, low-quality links that manual disavow files no longer changed outcomes. At the time of writing, there is no disavow submission anywhere in the Bing Webmaster Tools interface.

What to do instead if you're worried about toxic backlinks:

1. Trust the algorithm on ordinary link spam. Scraper sites, spam directories, and random low-quality links pointing at your domain are overwhelmingly discounted automatically — by Bing and Google alike. For the typical site, no action is the correct action.
2. Audit your profile with the Backlinks tool. Bing WMT's backlink report shows referring domains, anchor text, and target pages, and its "similar sites" comparison helps you judge whether your profile looks anomalous for your niche.
3. Act at the source for genuinely dangerous links. If you're cleaning up after a negative SEO hit or a link-buying history, request removal from the linking sites directly — that fixes the problem in every search engine at once.
4. Report manipulative behavior. Egregious spam networks can be reported to Bing via its feedback channels, and Google still accepts disavow files through its own Search Console if you need one there.

The disavow tool's retirement is genuinely good news for most site owners: it removes a footgun that anxious webmasters routinely pointed at their own rankings by disavowing perfectly healthy links.

IndexNow: Get New Pages Indexed in Minutes

IndexNow is an open protocol, co-created by Microsoft, that lets your site push URL changes to search engines the instant they happen, instead of waiting for a crawler to wander back. Publish, update, or delete a page, fire a lightweight API ping, and Bing knows immediately. Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and other engines participate in the protocol too, so one ping notifies all of them.

Setting it up:

1. Generate an API key in Bing Webmaster Tools (or at indexnow.org) and host the key file at your site root — it proves the pings come from the site owner.
2. Automate the pings. WordPress SEO plugins (Rank Math, AIOSEO, the official IndexNow plugin), Cloudflare's built-in integration, and most modern SEO platforms can send IndexNow notifications automatically on every publish or update. AutoSEO pushes every article it publishes through IndexNow as part of its automated publishing pipeline.
3. Verify it's working in the URL Submission section of Bing WMT, which logs submitted URLs and their processing status.

IndexNow matters most for sites where freshness is the product — news, e-commerce inventory, job boards, frequently updated blogs — but even for a static company site it eliminates the multi-day lag between publishing and appearing in Bing. Alongside it, the manual URL Submission feature remains available with a daily quota that scales with your site's verified history; use it for one-off priority pages if you haven't wired up IndexNow.

Beyond Indexing: The Tools Worth Opening Monthly

Three underused features earn a recurring slot in your workflow:

• Site Scan. An on-demand technical crawl (with generous free limits) that catches broken internal links, missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, oversized images, and header problems. It's not a replacement for a dedicated audit platform, but as a free smoke test after a redesign or migration, it's excellent.
• Keyword Research. Real Bing query volumes, related keywords, and question phrases, filterable by country and language — free. Volumes are Bing-only, so treat them as directional and smaller than Google numbers, but the relative comparisons and question mining are legitimately useful for content planning.
• Search Performance + top linked pages. Cross-reference your highest-impression, low-CTR queries with the pages receiving them; rewriting titles and descriptions for those pages is reliably the fastest organic win available, in Bing and everywhere else.

Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console

You need both — they're free and complementary, not competing:

Capability	Bing Webmaster Tools	Google Search Console
Performance data window	~6 months	16 months
Index coverage	Site Explorer + URL Inspection	Page indexing report + URL Inspection
Built-in keyword research	Yes, free	No
Instant indexing	IndexNow (open protocol)	No general equivalent
Technical site audit	Site Scan built in	No (Lighthouse is separate)
Disavow tool	Removed	Still available
Verification import	One-click import from GSC	—

The efficient setup: verify GSC first, import into Bing WMT second, submit your sitemap in both, enable IndexNow, and put a monthly reminder on coverage review in each.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes, completely. Every feature — Search Performance, Site Explorer, URL Inspection, Site Scan, Keyword Research, Backlinks, sitemap and URL submission, IndexNow — is free with no usage tiers or paid upgrades. You only need a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account to sign in.

How do I submit my sitemap to Bing?

Verify your site at bing.com/webmasters, open the Sitemaps section, click Submit sitemap, and enter your sitemap's full URL (e.g. `https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml`). Bing processes it within minutes and shows discovered URL counts and errors. Also declare the sitemap in your robots.txt file so Bing can rediscover it automatically. If your site is verified in Google Search Console, the one-click GSC import brings your sitemaps across during verification.

How long does Bing take to index a new website?

Typically anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for a brand-new domain, depending on crawlability, internal linking, and inbound links. You can compress that dramatically: verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap, and use IndexNow or URL Submission for priority pages — pushed URLs are often crawled within hours. Persistent non-indexing usually traces back to noindex directives, robots.txt blocks, or thin content, all visible in URL Inspection.

Does Bing still have a disavow links tool?

No. Microsoft removed the Disavow Links feature from Bing Webmaster Tools (announced in late 2023), on the grounds that Bing's ranking systems already detect and ignore spammy links automatically. At the time of writing there is no way — and for almost all sites, no need — to disavow links in Bing. If a manual cleanup is genuinely warranted, pursue link removal at the source, which fixes your profile across every search engine simultaneously.

Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth it if I already use Google Search Console?

Yes — the marginal cost is ten minutes thanks to GSC import, and you gain things Google doesn't offer: free keyword research data, IndexNow instant indexing, a built-in technical site scanner, and visibility into the index that feeds Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Microsoft Copilot's AI answers. For any site that cares about total organic reach rather than Google alone, it's one of the highest-leverage free tools available.