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Why Smart SEO Experts Are Switching to Bing Webmaster Tools.
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What is going on, guys? Let me ask you a quick question about tracking your website's search engine traffic.
When you want to check how your website is doing organically—when you want to see if your SEO efforts are actually paying off—what is the very first tool you open?
I can almost guarantee it’s Google Search Console. You log in, you check your clicks, you stare at that little performance graph, and you call it a day. We all do it. Google is the big player in the room, right?
But what if I told you that by exclusively obsessing over Google, you are actively leaving thousands of highly qualified, high-converting visitors on the table?
For years, I completely ignored the "other" search engine. I thought of Bing as the quirky underdog. But then I looked at my analytics. I realized something crazy: not only was my website ranking on Bing and pulling in a massive chunk of traffic from Microsoft's search engine, but those visitors were actually converting at a higher rate than my Google traffic! Especially in the B2B space, Bing users are often desktop users, corporate professionals, and people ready to make buying decisions.
And here is the absolute kicker: to tap into this audience, you need to use a tool that most website owners don't even have an account for.
Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on "Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)".
Consider this your ultimate, definitive, over-the-shoulder masterclass. I am not going to throw jargon at you and expect you to understand it. I am going to keep it stupidly simple. We are going to go through every single button, every single tab, and every single feature in this platform. By the end of this article, you’ll know more about driving traffic from Bing than 99% of digital marketers out there.
Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and let’s dive right into the screen!
Alright, first things first. Before we can start mining this tool for golden data, we need to actually get your site on the platform.
Head over to the Bing Webmaster Tools homepage and sign in. Now, if you are completely new here, the platform is going to prompt you to add your site right away.
Here is where Microsoft throws us a massive bone. If your website is already set up and verified over in Google Search Console, Bing has this magical "Import" button. Literally, you click it, sign in with your Google account, and boom—your site is added. No coding, no messing with servers. It’s like skipping the line at a club.
But what if you can’t do that? What if you want to do it from scratch? Existing users can simply look at the top-left drop-down domain list, scroll to the bottom, and click the "+ Add a site" icon.
If you are going the manual route, you have to prove to Bing that you actually own the website. You can't just claim you own Nike.com and start looking at their data, right? So, we have to go through a verification process.
When adding a website manually, Bing is going to give you a few different ways to prove you are the rightful owner. Let's break down the four methods you can use. Don't worry if you aren't technical; I’m going to explain these so simply that your grandma could verify a domain.
I am going to save you a lot of headaches right now: do this one. DNS Auto Verification is the quickest and absolute easiest method available.
What is DNS? Think of it as the phonebook of the internet. It connects your domain name (like yoursite.com) to the server where your website lives. If your domain provider (like GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Cloudflare) supports this feature, Bing will literally just give you a button that says 'Sign in to verify'.
You click it, you log into your domain provider, you hit "approve," and you are done. It is seamless. Always try this method first.
Okay, let's say the easy button didn't work. Method number two is XML file authentication.
Bing will give you a tiny little file to download called BingSiteAuth.xml. Your job is to take this file and drop it into the "root directory" of your website. The root directory is just the main, top-level folder of your website—where your homepage lives.
If you use WordPress, you can usually use a File Manager plugin or log into your hosting cPanel to upload it. Once uploaded, you go back to Bing, hit verify, and Bing's bots will visit your site, see the file sitting there, and say, "Yep, this person has access to the server. They own the site."
If uploading files sounds scary, try the Meta tag authentication.
Bing gives you a short line of code that looks something like .
You just need to copy that code and paste it into the HTML of your homepage. Specifically, it needs to go in the section, right before the section begins.
If you are on WordPress, almost any SEO plugin (like Yoast, RankMath, or All in One SEO) has a specific box in their settings labeled "Bing Webmaster Tools Verification." You literally just paste the code into that box, hit save, and Bing will verify you instantly.
This one is for the slightly more technical folks. If you can't log in automatically via DNS Auto Verification, you can do it manually by adding a CNAME record.
Bing will give you a specific sequence of numbers and letters. You need to log into your domain registrar (where you bought your domain), go to your DNS settings, and create a new record. You set the type to "CNAME," paste in the value Bing gave you, and save it. It might take a few minutes (sometimes longer) for the internet to update, but once it does, Bing will recognize it and verify your site.
Boom! You are in. Once your site is verified, you are greeted by the Home dashboard.
You can always navigate back here by clicking on your site in the top-left drop-down menu. Think of the Home screen as your 10,000-foot view. It doesn’t give you the microscopic details, but it gives you a top-level overview of your site's heartbeat. Are your clicks going up? Are there any glaring errors?
Everything you actually need to do is located in the left-hand navigation menu. This menu houses all the features at your disposal in Bing Webmaster Tools. We are going to go down this list, tab by tab, and leave no stone unturned.
Alright, if you are doing SEO, this tab right here is your bread and butter. The Search Performance tab is where the magic happens. This is where you see exactly how much traffic Bing is sending you.
When you open this up, the top half of the page hits you with a beautiful graph. By default, it shows your performance over the last three months. But you are in control. You can use the drop-down menu at the top right of the screen to alter the timeframe.
You have options to view data from a custom timeframe or the last:
7 days
30 days
3 months
6 months
*(Note: Bing actually recently upgraded this! They listened to user feedback and increased the maximum time range up to a massive 16 months, bringing it perfectly in line with Google Search Console!)*
On the graph, you’ll see two main lines.
The purple line represents clicks—this is the actual number of human beings who saw your site in Bing's organic search results and clicked through to read your content.
The blue line represents impressions—this highlights how many times your website was shown in the search results, even if the person didn't click.
Just like in Google Search Console, you can also toggle on the average click-through rate (CTR) and your average position (where you rank on the page).
Graphs are pretty, but they don't pay the bills. You need actionable data. If you scroll to the bottom half of the interface, Bing segments all this data by either keyword or page.
This is insanely useful for monitoring the effects of your on-page and off-page SEO efforts.
Let's say you just rewrote a blog post about "Best Running Shoes for Flat Feet." You can go to the "Pages" tab, find that exact URL, and see if clicks and impressions are going up.
Even better, within the keywords tab, you can click into an individual keyword (like "running shoes") to see a list of 'served pages'. Served pages are the specific URLs from your site that Bing has decided to rank for that exact keyword. If Bing is ranking your "About Us" page for a product keyword instead of your actual "Product" page, you know you have a huge SEO problem to fix!
This is where Bing starts to flex its muscles and separate itself from Google. Recently, Bing Webmaster Tools has branched off from Google Search Console by adding some incredible new data directly into the Search Performance report.
You can now view crawl requests, crawl errors, and indexed pages right alongside your traffic data. Why does this matter? Imagine you have a massive e-commerce site with 10,000 products. If your traffic drops, you need to know: did my rankings drop, or did Bing just stop crawling my pages because of an error? This new feature is particularly handy for larger sites looking to increase the crawlability and indexability of their content.
And let's talk about the elephant in the room: AI. In 2026, Bing completely revolutionized the game by adding an AI Performance Report.
Bing is currently the first major player to separate AI citations (traffic you get when Bing's AI chatbot, Copilot, uses your site as a source) from traditional search clicks. You can literally see how much traffic AI is driving to your business!
Moving down the menu, we land on the URL Inspection tool. If you've been doing SEO for a while, you might remember this as "Fetch as Bingbot."
If the Search Performance tab is your telescope, the URL Inspection tool is your microscope. This is where you investigate individual URLs.
Let's say you just published an incredible piece of content, but you can't find it on Bing. You paste the URL into this tool, and Bing tells you exactly what’s going on. Any errors with crawling, indexing, or structured data markup will show up right here in plain English. If you updated a page recently, this is also where you hit the button to request indexing, forcing Bing to come take a fresh look.
If you click on the "Live URL" tab and then hit "View Tested page," you get to look under the hood. You can:
See the HTML viewed by Bingbot: You can check that the code Bing sees actually matches the content you want to serve to users.
Find out what your page source and HTTP header look like: This is highly technical, but crucial for ensuring your server is responding correctly.
Determine if a URL is being blocked: If your robots.txt file is accidentally telling Bing to go away, it will flag it right here.
But here is where Bing Webmaster Tools goes above and beyond Google. Bing doesn't just tell you if the page is indexed; it actively acts like an SEO consultant! It highlights SEO issues with the URL in question. For example, it might scan your page and warn you, "Hey, an image on this page is missing an alt attribute!" It is constantly trying to help you win.
Next up is Site Explorer. Previously known as Index Explorer, this function is another prime example of Bing taking things one step further than Google.
Most SEO tools show you a list of your pages. Site Explorer allows you to view the structure of your site exactly as it is seen by Bingbot—in a folder-by-folder, hierarchical view.
Think of it like viewing the files and folders on your computer desktop. You can select a specific subfolder (like yoursite.com/blog/) or an individual page using the Explorer panel on the left.
When you click on a folder, Bing blasts you with a wealth of information:
Crawl data: You see pages broken down by indexed, error, warning, and excluded.
Traffic data: The number of clicks and impressions that specific subfolder received in the last six months.
Backlink data: How many external backlinks are pointing directly towards that subfolder.
Bot activity: The exact dates when the subfolder or page was last crawled and discovered by Bingbot.
Technical data: The HTTP code (like a 200 OK or a 404 Not Found) and the document size in bytes.
With all of this data at your fingertips, Site Explorer provides the ability to delve deep into different areas of your site. If you notice your /blog/ folder is thriving but your /products/ folder has a ton of crawl errors, you immediately know where to focus your resources.
Let’s talk about mapping out your site for the search engines. All of your sitemaps are housed within this tab.
What is a sitemap? Imagine inviting someone to a massive museum with 500 rooms, but not giving them a map. They might find some cool art, but they'll miss half the building. A sitemap is literally a map of your website that you hand to search engine bots so they can find every single page easily.
At the top of the Sitemaps page, Bing gives you a fantastic dashboard with counters for:
The number of known sitemaps
Sitemaps with errors
Sitemaps with warnings
The total URLs discovered on your site
In the table below that, you’ll find a complete list of every sitemap you've submitted, with the ability to order them by URL, the date it was last submitted, the date it was last crawled, its current status, and the number of URLs discovered. It is clean, organized, and highly effective.
Submitting a sitemap is incredibly easy. First, you need to generate one (most SEO plugins do this automatically and create a link like yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml).
To submit it, visit the Sitemaps page and click on the bright blue 'Submit sitemap' icon at the top right of the interface. Paste your link, and you're done.
Here is a cool fun fact: Bing is way more flexible than Google here. While Google Search Console strictly only takes XML files, the accepted formats for Bing are XML, RSS 2.0, mRSS (Media RSS), Atom 0.3 & 1.0, and even plain text files!
Let's say you just wrote an absolute banger of an article. You want it ranking on Bing tonight. You don't want to wait days for Bingbot to naturally stumble upon it.
Enter the URL Submission tab.
If you recently updated a piece of content or published a brand new landing page, you use this tab to request that the page is recrawled and indexed as an absolute priority. Simply click on one of the blue 'Submit URLs' icons at the top or bottom of the interface.
Here is a massive win for Bing: Unlike Google Search Console, which makes you submit URLs one painful click at a time, Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to submit a handful of URLs for indexing all at once! You just paste them in a list.
By default, the vast majority of sites get up to 10,000 URL submissions each day. Yes, you heard that right. 10,000.
Now, what if you are a giant news publisher uploading hundreds of articles a day? If you're dealing with a high volume of page uploads, it's worth implementing Bing's Submission API to automate this process. This is part of Bing's IndexNow protocol.
Bing actively encourages the use of IndexNow because it provides the "freshness signals" to Copilot (their AI) that help the tool ground its answers in the latest available information. Today, most modern SEO plugins (like Yoast or RankMath) have IndexNow built-in. This means they automatically ping Bing the exact second you hit “Publish,” making manual URL submission less necessary than it used to be. It’s automated SEO at its finest!
Alright guys, rub your hands together because this is where we make the money. We are entering the SEO section of Bing Webmaster Tools. This section is completely replete with incredible, entirely free tools to help you with your on-page and off-page optimization work. People pay hundreds of dollars a month for tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, and Bing is giving you enterprise-level data for free. Let's break it down.
First up is the Backlinks tool. Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to your website. They are essentially "votes of confidence" in the eyes of search engines. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher you rank.
Bing completely updated this tool recently to include a raft of new functionalities. In the main 'All Links' tab, you'll find every single backlink directed towards pages on your site. You have the option to view them by:
Domains: Which websites are linking to you the most?
Pages: Which specific URLs on your site are getting the most links? (It shows both the source URL linking to you, and your target URL).
Anchor text: What exact words are people clicking on to reach your site? (e.g., are they clicking "click here" or "best SEO agency"?).
The top of the page is populated with satisfying counters showing your total number of referring domains, referring pages, and unique anchor texts.
But wait, I haven't even told you the best part. One cool feature that really sets the BWT Backlinks feature apart from the rest is the ability to compare your site's off-page performance with others. Yes, you can spy on your competitors!
Head over to the 'Similar sites' tab and click the 'Add a site to compare' button at the top right. Put in your biggest competitor's URL. In this view, you'll see a side-by-side comparison of your sites across top referring domains and top anchor texts. You can literally steal their backlink strategy!
We can't talk about SEO without talking about keywords. The Keyword Research interface in Bing Webmaster Tools is a brilliantly useful innovation.
Instead of guessing what people are searching for, you type a query into this tool, and Bing gives you real trend data showing impressions by country. You want to know if "standing desks" are popular in the UK right now? This tool will tell you.
It also lets you segment the data by language and device (desktop vs. mobile), and you have the option to change the timeframe at the top right of the page to spot seasonal trends.
Lower down the page, you'll find a bunch of handy research tools that can help you discover new search terms and expand on your content strategy. Bing breaks these down into:
Related keywords: Things similar to your main idea.
Question keywords: What exact questions are people typing into Bing? (e.g., "How to assemble a standing desk?"). This is absolute gold for writing blog posts!
Newly discovered terms: Trending phrases that just hit the market.
This is another area where Bing Webmaster Tools takes a step in a completely different direction from Google. Google Search Console will tell you if your site is broken, but it won't really teach you how to do SEO.
Bing provides fully automated SEO Reports.
Particularly useful if you're new to SEO or don't have the budget for a technical SEO audit, this section of the tool identifies issues with your on-page optimization efforts. It scans your site automatically every two weeks and flags common problems like:
The presence of multiple tags on a single page is (a big no-no).
Missing meta descriptions.
The lack of alt attributes on your pictures.
To help you prioritize your workload and gauge the impact each change could have, Bing is smart enough to break the error types down into low, moderate, and high severity. Fix the high severity ones first to see immediate ranking bumps!
Building on the exact same principle as the SEO Reports, but viewed at a micro, page-by-page level, the Site Scan function gives you the option to act like a technical SEO auditor. You can trigger an on-demand audit anytime you want.
To kick things off, you simply click on the blue 'Start new scan' icon at the top right of the interface, fill in the form (you can choose to scan your whole site or just specific folders), and let it run.
From here, you'll be taken to a master dashboard that lists all of the SEO issues detected across your site. These are beautifully broken down into different types of issues:
Errors: Critical problems you need to fix yesterday (e.g., missing meta description, 404 broken pages).
Warnings: Things that are hurting your potential (e.g., title tag is too long and getting cut off in search results).
Notices: Minor best-practice tweaks (e.g., more than one h1 tag).
It is practically a free, integrated version of Screaming Frog!
Okay, we’ve covered the growth tools. Now we need to look at the control panel. The Configuration section of Bing Webmaster Tools gives you absolute power over how Bingbot interacts with your website.
Have you ever had your website crash because too many bots were trying to read it at the exact same time? It happens more often than you think, especially on cheaper hosting plans.
This is where the Crawl Control tab is incredibly useful. If your site experiences significant peaks of human traffic at certain times, you don't want Bingbot eating up your server bandwidth at that exact same moment.
Crawl Control allows you to literally draw on a chart and specify exactly when you'd like Bingbot to crawl your site. If you run a local bakery and you know that most of your users browse your site during the afternoon to order lunch, you can tell Bing to crawl your site the fastest in the middle of the night to avoid overloading your servers.
You can set it to slow down the crawling process during working hours when your site is at its busiest, ensuring your real, paying customers never experience a slow-loading page.
Sometimes, you have pages on your site that you absolutely do not want appearing in search engines. Maybe it's a private admin page, or maybe it's a weird duplicate page generated by your e-commerce store.
A common culprit is URL parameters. URL parameters are used to differentiate between multiple versions of the same resource on a site. For example, e-commerce sites that allow you to filter a list of shoes by color or style use a short section of text after a question mark in the URL to achieve this. It looks like this:
https://example.com/mens\_shoes?name=nike&color=purple
The problem? Search engines don't always differentiate based on these parameters. They see 50 different variations of your shoe page, index all of them, and cause a massive issue known as keyword cannibalization (where your own pages compete against each other in the search results).
In Bing Webmaster Tools, you can use the Block URLs function to forcefully prevent unwanted URLs and URL parameters from being shown in search results.
Pro Tip: While this provides an immediate fix in Bing, it is technically temporary (it lasts about 90 days). You should also add a NOINDEX robots meta tag to the affected pages on your website to solve the problem permanently across all search engines.
We are moving into the mechanic's garage now. The Tools & Enhancements section is where you'll find the technical features required to check that your pages are crawlable, and more importantly, to prevent malicious bots from bringing your site down.
Your robots.txt file is a plain text file sitting on your server that acts as a bouncer for your website. It tells search engine bots what they are allowed to look at, and what is off-limits.
But writing a robots.txt file can be tricky, and one typo can accidentally de-index your entire website!
As the name suggests, the Robots.txt Tester tool gives you a safe environment to test whether a URL on your site is blocked from indexation. You paste a URL in, and the tool reads your robots file and says "Allowed" or "Blocked."
But the lower panel goes one magical step further. It enables you to actively edit your robots.txt file within Bing Webmaster Tools itself to test changes in real time. If you find that important pages are being blocked, simply remove the blocking rule in the editor, test it to ensure it says "Allowed," and click proceed in the bottom right corner of the screen. (Note: You still need to update the actual file on your server to make it permanent!).
Not every bot is your friend. Search engine bots like Bingbot and Googlebot are helpful pieces of software that crawl content, helping to make it available to users everywhere, which drives you free traffic.
[
](Bing Webmaster Tools)
Unfortunately, the Internet is also a dark place full of malicious bots. There are bots designed to scrape your content, break into your user accounts, and spam your online contact forms with useless garbage data. Often, these bad bots will "spoof" or fake their identity, pretending to be Bingbot so your server lets them in!
The Verify Bingbot tool is your lie detector test. If you are looking at your server logs and see a suspicious IP address hitting your site 1,000 times a minute claiming to be Bing, you paste that IP address into this tool. Bing will check its own records and tell you instantly to make sure that it's actually from Bing, rather than a harmful source elsewhere. If it’s a fake, you can block that IP address at your firewall!
Now we are dealing with the legal and safety side of running a website. You have to protect your brand, and Bing provides the tools to help you manage that relationship.
Nobody likes having their content stolen, and nobody likes being accused of stealing content.
This tool flags any URLs on your site that have been hit with a DMCA or copyright infringement notice. If someone claims you stole their image or copied their text, they can report you to Bing. Bing will investigate this and, if they find that your content infringes copyright, they will straight-up prevent your content from being served in search results.
It’s crucial to monitor this tab. If you find that any copyright allegations have been made against your site, and you know for a fact that you own the rights to the content, you don't have to just take it lying down. You can submit a counter notice directly via this page to formally contest the claim and get your pages back into the search results.
Running a website is rarely a solo gig. Eventually, you might hire an SEO agency, a freelance writer, or a web developer. You need to give them access to this data, but you don't want to give them your Microsoft login and password.
The User Management page is relatively self-explanatory, allowing you to control exactly who can access the account and, more importantly, dictate their permission level. There are three levels to choose from:
Read Only: Perfect for writers or entry-level marketers. They can look at the data, but they can't change any settings or submit sitemaps.
Read/Write: Good for your SEO agency. They can optimize your presence, submit URLs, and run Site Scans.
Administrator: Only for you or your co-founders. They have full control, including the ability to add or delete other users.
Okay guys, I saved the absolute best for last. If you take away just one thing from this entire guide, let it be this.
Microsoft Clarity is the final feature in the Bing Webmaster Tools arsenal, and it marks a huge, monumental departure from Google Search Console's offering.
Made available to all users in October 2020, Clarity is a completely free-to-use analytics product that will absolutely skyrocket your conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts. Tools that do what Clarity does usually cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a month (think Hotjar or Crazy Egg). Microsoft gives it to you for free, fully integrated.
Do you want to learn more about how real human users are actually engaging with the content on your site?
Microsoft Clarity offers a free heatmapping functionality. It literally tracks where users click, where they move their mouse, and how far down the page they scroll. It aggregates all this data and lays a glowing, color-coded heatmap over your website.
Is everyone clicking on an image that isn't actually a link? Now you know to make it a link!
Are 80% of people stopping scrolling right before your "Buy Now" button? Now you know you need to move the button higher up the page!
This profound insight into the user journey highlights UI elements that are causing confusion or delays. You use this visual data to streamline your design and boost your conversions overnight.
But heatmaps aren't even the craziest part. The session playbacks feature is mind-blowing. Clarity actually records individual user sessions on your site. You can sit there with a bowl of popcorn and watch video recordings of user behavior on your site as it unfolded in real-time. You watch their mouse cursor move around. You watch them hesitate, highlight text, or struggle to find a menu item.
There is no better way to back up aggregated data than by watching actual users interact with your creation. It removes all the guesswork from web design.
And there you have it, guys.
We have literally gone through every single nook, cranny, and drop-down menu that Bing Webmaster Tools has to offer. We’ve covered everything from simple verification, to deep-dive SEO Site Scans, to recording user screens with Microsoft Clarity.
If you are serious about growing your organic traffic, you cannot afford to have a one-track mind. Yes, Google is massive. Yes, Google Search Console is important. But Bing Webmaster Tools offers data, insights, and free premium features that Google simply refuses to provide.
By setting this up today, you are giving yourself a massive competitive advantage. You are picking up the highly-qualified traffic that your competitors are too lazy to reach for.
If this guide opened your eyes and helped you unlock that hidden traffic goldmine, bookmark this page, share it with your marketing team, and start dominating the search engines—all of them.
Now get out there and get optimizing!
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