What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is, for Bing, what Search Console is for Google: the dashboard where a site's owner sees how the search engine treats it. Many stores put it off because Bing has less market share than Google, and that is the miscalculation: according to Microsoft (June 2025), Bing serves other searches and AI tools, among them Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT, in addition to Copilot.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility} And since February 2026 it has something Microsoft presented as a first: a count of how many times an AI-generated answer cites your pages.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}

What it includes

The setup. You go to bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account, add the site and prove it is yours with one of five methods: Domain Connect (if your DNS provider supports it), an XML verification file in the root, a meta tag on the home page, a TXT record in the DNS or direct import from Search Console, if the site is already verified there.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}

The search reports. Once verified, the dashboard starts collecting data. Microsoft lists what it brings:⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}

• Search performance: impressions, clicks and average position by page and by keyword, with up to 16 months of data.
• URL inspection: the indexing status of a specific URL, whether it can be crawled, its HTTP response code and the blocked resources.
• Site Explorer: the site's structure as Bing sees it, with the indexed pages, crawl blocks and error responses.
• Sitemaps: submitted and monitored from here; Bing processes them at least once every 24 hours.
• Site Scan: a technical audit that looks for broken links, duplicate tags and missing metadata.
• robots.txt tester and crawl control, to decide when Bingbot visits and which pages should not appear.
• Prioritized recommendations, keyword research, inbound links and a Copilot assistant inside the dashboard.

The change notices. Bing Webmaster Tools is integrated with IndexNow, the protocol your site uses to tell Bing and the other participating search engines that a URL has been created, changed or deleted, without waiting for a crawl. Microsoft gives it as an optional but highly recommended setup step, along with submitting the sitemap.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}

AI Performance: citations in AI answers

On February 10, 2026, Microsoft opened a new report in public preview, AI Performance, which shows how your content appears as a source in Copilot, in Bing's AI-generated summaries and in some partner integrations.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview} It has five views:⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}

• Total citations: how many times your content was shown as a source in generated answers, without saying where in the answer.
• Average cited pages: how many distinct pages on your site show up as a source per day, on average.
• Grounding queries: the key phrases the AI used to retrieve the content that ended up cited. It is a sample, not the total.
• Citations by page: which URLs are cited most. Bing warns that this reflects frequency, not importance, position or place in the answer.
• Trend: how citations change over time.

On June 16, 2026, it added four features, also in preview. Intents classifies grounding queries into categories such as informational, commercial, navigational, local or research. Topics groups related queries into topical clusters. Citation Share gives the percentage of the citations for a grounding query that belong to your site, out of those of all the sites cited for that same query. And Compare overlays a previous period on the current one.⁠^{[3]Microsoft Bing Blog (June 16, 2026). New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare} Microsoft is insistent about what they are not: citation share does not show competitors' domains, is not a share of traffic and does not score content quality, and the intent and topic classifications come from models that are still being tuned.⁠^{[3]Microsoft Bing Blog (June 16, 2026). New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare}

One detail worth knowing before touching anything: Bing says it respects the preferences you express in robots.txt and in the other control mechanisms it supports.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}

In a store

Here is how the citations-by-page view might read for a backpack store, with the grounding query you see when you open each URL and the intent Bing assigns it. It is a fictitious example: the URLs, the queries and the figures are made up to show how to read the report.

The useful reading is in the differences. The first product page is cited on purchase queries: it is entering the conversation when someone compares. The capacity guide is cited on informational queries, before anyone has decided what to buy, and it is the door to the product pages. The 40-liter product page is cited little for a query that asks for exact dimensions: if its dimensions are not written in text, the AI has nowhere to get them. Bing recommends exactly that for pages that are cited less than they should be: clear headings, tables, FAQs and data with its source.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}

How to check it

1. Set up the store. Go to bing.com/webmasters and, if you already have it in Search Console, import it; if not, verify it with the meta tag, the XML file or a TXT record.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}
2. Submit the sitemap from the Sitemaps section, or declare it in robots.txt. Bing processes it at least once every 24 hours.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}
3. Inspect an important product page with URL inspection: indexing status, response code and blocked resources.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}
4. Turn on IndexNow from your platform, if it comes built in, or in the site's code.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility}
5. Open AI Performance and see which pages are cited, with which grounding queries and with what intent; use Compare to see whether a change to your product pages moved the citations.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview}⁠^{[3]Microsoft Bing Blog (June 16, 2026). New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare}

Related concept: Search Console

Both tools are free, ask you to verify the site and share the basics: performance, URL inspection and sitemaps.⁠^{[1]Microsoft, Bing Webmaster blog (June 2025). Start Using Bing Webmaster Tools to Improve Your Site Visibility} The difference is in AI, because each one measures something different. Search Console gives your site's impressions in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, for all sites since August 31, 2026.⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)} Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations as a source in Copilot and in Bing's summaries.⁠^{[2]Microsoft, Webmaster Tools blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview} An impression says a link to your site was shown; a citation says your page was a source of the answer. Neither sees what the other sees, so a store that wants to know where it appears in AI search needs both.

To go further, the measurement and verification reading path orders the rest of the terms, and the entry on AI citation explains what counts as a citation in each assistant.