Fix library

How to get your site indexed in Bing for AI search

The Brimm team · grounded in the docs

To get cited in Microsoft Copilot you first have to be in Bing's index, because Copilot is built on top of it. The fastest route is to create a free account in Bing Webmaster Tools, import your 1 verified property from Google Search Console, submit your sitemap, and let bingbot through your robots.txt. The principle is plain: “you can't be cited from an index you are not in.” Get indexed first, then worry about ranking.

Symptom: Bing barely knows you exist

Here is the test that exposes the problem. Go to Bing and run a site: query for your domain, like site:yourwebsite.com. If Bing returns 0 results, or a handful when you publish hundreds of pages, Bing has not indexed your site. That is the whole story right there. Everything downstream, including whether Copilot can ever quote you, depends on closing that gap.

Owners assume that because Google has them indexed, Bing does too. It does not work that way. Bing runs its own crawler and its own index on its own schedule, and a site that Google has fully crawled can be almost invisible to Bing for months. The two engines do not share their indexes with each other.

Why this matters for AI search

Microsoft Copilot is built on Bing's index. When Copilot answers a question with live web sources, it draws from what Bing has crawled and stored. So if Bing has not indexed your pages, you cannot appear in Copilot answers, no matter how good the page is. The index is the gate, and Copilot stands behind it.

Be careful with one common claim here. People say ChatGPT runs on Bing, so Bing indexation gets you into ChatGPT. That was closer to true historically, when ChatGPT browsing leaned on Bing. Today OpenAI operates its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, for ChatGPT search, so do not overstate that ChatGPT depends on Bing now. Bing indexation matters most for Copilot. Treat Copilot as the prize and ChatGPT as a separate path with its own crawler.

Cause: no account, no sitemap, or a blocked crawler

A site goes unindexed in Bing for a small number of concrete reasons, and they are easy to check in order:

You never told Bing you exist. There is no Bing Webmaster Tools account and no submitted sitemap, so Bing has no fast path to discover your URLs.
Your robots.txt blocks bingbot, on purpose or by accident, so the crawler that fills the index is turned away at the door.
New and updated pages are not announced, so Bing finds them slowly, on its own crawl schedule, if at all.

None of these are exotic. The most common is simply that nobody ever set up Bing Webmaster Tools, because the whole world optimizes for Google and forgets Bing carries Copilot.

Fix step one: create Bing Webmaster Tools and import from Google

Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and create a free account. You do not have to start from scratch. Bing lets you import your verified sites directly from Google Search Console, which carries over your verification in one step so you skip the DNS and meta-tag dance. If you would rather verify manually, Bing accepts an XML file, a meta tag, or a DNS record, the same options Google offers.

Fix step two: submit your sitemap

Once your property is verified, submit your sitemap inside Bing Webmaster Tools. Point Bing at the same sitemap.xml you give Google, the full canonical list of URLs you want indexed. This is the map that tells the crawler what to fetch and in what shape your site is laid out.

# In your robots.txt, also declare the sitemap so any crawler finds it
Sitemap: https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Submitting the sitemap in the dashboard and declaring it in robots.txt are belt and suspenders. Do both. The dashboard gives Bing a direct, authenticated nudge, and the robots.txt line covers any crawler that arrives without it.

Fix step three: use IndexNow to push new and updated URLs

Sitemaps are passive. IndexNow is active. It is a protocol Bing supports that lets you ping the engine the moment you publish or change a page, instead of waiting for the next crawl. You submit the changed URLs and Bing knows to come fetch them. For a site that updates often, this is the difference between same-day indexing and waiting weeks.

You can't be cited from an index you are not in.

Set up an IndexNow key, then notify Bing on every publish and every meaningful edit. Many CMS platforms and plugins handle this automatically once you add the key, so check whether your stack already speaks IndexNow before you build anything by hand.

Fix step four: let bingbot through robots.txt

None of the above matters if your robots.txt turns the crawler away. Make sure bingbot is allowed. Open the file and confirm you are not blocking it, either by name or with a blanket rule that catches everything:

# Let Bing crawl the site so it can index you
User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /

# A blanket disallow blocks bingbot too. Don't ship this by accident.
# User-agent: *
# Disallow: /

This is the single most damaging accident in the whole sequence. A leftover Disallow: / from a staging environment, or an over-eager rule meant to keep some bot out, will quietly keep Bing out too, and you will wonder why nothing ever indexes.

Verify: re-run the site: query and check coverage

Give Bing time to crawl after you submit, then verify two ways. First, open Bing Webmaster Tools and check the coverage and indexing reports, which show how many of your URLs Bing has actually stored and flag any it could not fetch. Second, run the site:yourwebsite.com query again. If the count is climbing toward your real page count, the fix is working. If pages are still missing, the coverage report will usually name the reason, a fetch error, a block, or a page Bing chose not to index.

Indexation is not instant. Bing crawls on its own cadence, so expect days, not minutes, especially for a site it is meeting for the first time. IndexNow speeds it up but does not make it instantaneous. Check back, watch the coverage number, and let the crawl catch up.

What this does and does not buy you

Getting indexed in Bing is the entry ticket, not the win. It makes you eligible to appear in Bing results and, through Bing's index, in Copilot answers. It does not by itself rank you or get you cited. For that you still need the same fundamentals that work everywhere: a page that is readable without JavaScript, an answer that leads with specifics, and a heading that matches the question a person would ask. Google says the same thing about its own AI features, that there is no separate framework and the page has to be crawlable and indexable before any of it matters. The order is fixed. Be in the index first, then earn the citation.

Check your own page

You can do all of this by hand, or paste your link into Brimm and we will check whether bingbot is allowed, whether your sitemap and robots.txt are sound, and whether your top passage is quotable enough to earn a Copilot citation once you are indexed. We read your site the way the engines do and print the failures in fix order. Start with the GEO audit if you want the AI-search view first, browse the rest of the fix library, or read what generative engine optimization is for the bigger picture.