Bing Webmaster Tools: setup, the AI Performance report, and what it cannot tell you

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free console for a site you own, and setting it up takes one verification step out of five available methods. Once the site is verified you get search performance, sitemap and backlink reports — plus the AI Performance report, which counts how often your pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot and in the AI answers Bing shows. That report is the reason to bother.

Before you start

You need a site you can prove you own, and a sitemap URL. If you already push updates through IndexNow setup, this is the console where the result of those pushes becomes visible; the push tells Bing a URL changed, and nothing in your own logs tells you what happened next. Fifteen minutes covers the whole setup. The reports fill in over days, not minutes.

Why a second console is worth the fifteen minutes

Because it answers a question Google's console does not. Microsoft announced the AI Performance report in February 2026 as a public preview, describing it as "a new set of insights that shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations". Citations into those surfaces are counted per URL and per phrase. Nothing else in this stack reports that number to you for free.

Read the scope literally. Three surfaces are named, and every AI product outside that list — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google's AI surfaces — is not in the report and will not appear in it. A rising citation count here is evidence about Copilot and Bing, and about nothing else.

Bing Webmaster Tools does not measure "AI visibility". It measures Microsoft's surfaces, which is a subset you can actually count.

Which verification method to pick

All five methods produce the same verified state, so pick on the basis of what you can edit today. The import path is the fastest if the site is already verified with Google.

The last two fail the same way: verification survives until someone ships a change that removes the file or the tag, and the console then quietly loses the site. If you use either, write the file path or the tag into whatever document your team reads before a redesign.

Do it: six steps

Budget fifteen minutes. Steps 1 to 4 are the setup; steps 5 and 6 are what you actually come back for.

1. Sign in at the Bing Webmaster Tools site with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. The account is separate from the site; one account can hold many sites.
2. Choose Add a Site and enter the URL exactly as it resolves, including the protocol and the www or its absence. A site added as https://example.com and a site added as https://www.example.com are two different entries.
3. Verify with one method from the table above. Import from Google Search Console first if that path is open, because it needs no deployment.
4. Submit your sitemap under the sitemaps report, then leave it alone. This is the same file you already give Google; do not build a Bing-specific one.
5. Generate an API key under Settings > API Access if you intend to automate submissions. One key covers every site on the account.
6. Open the AI Performance report and record today's numbers before you change anything on the site. Without that first reading, the second reading is a number with nothing to compare against — the same rule as in record your baseline before you change anything.

Deliverable: what each AI Performance metric answers

Four metrics, four different questions. Microsoft's own definitions are in the left column, shortened; the right column is what you can do with each one.

Four more capabilities began rolling out in preview in June 2026: Intents, which classifies grounding queries into categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation and Local; Topics, which groups related grounding queries into thematic clusters; Citation Share; and Compare, which "allows publishers to overlay a previous time period directly onto the current reporting view".

Citation Share is the one people misread. Microsoft defines it as "the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites" for one and the same grounding phrase, and states plainly that it "is designed as an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content". Treat it as a share of a fixed pie for one phrase, nothing more.

Three ways this goes wrong

All three are quiet failures. None of them shows an error anywhere.

1. You verify, see empty reports the same afternoon, and conclude something is broken. The reports need crawl history and citation history behind them; an empty first day says nothing at all.
2. You read grounding queries as a complete list. Microsoft's own note says the data shown "represents a sample of overall citation activity", so a phrase that never appears may still have happened.
3. You add the site under one hostname and later move to the other. The old entry keeps reporting on a hostname nobody visits, and the new one starts from zero. Fixing this after six months costs you the history.

Where Bing Webmaster Tools stops

Bing Webmaster Tools will not tell you why a page is cited, and it will not tell you anything about the AI products Microsoft does not operate. The AI Performance report has been in preview since February 2026, which means the metric definitions can still change under you — Microsoft says of the Topics labels that "during the preview phase, some labels may still be broad – especially for highly specialized or niche domains". Nothing in this console reports traffic, so the citation numbers here cannot be joined to visits without work on your side.

It also assumes the pages are reachable in the first place. If a crawler cannot fetch your pages, no console reports anything; that check comes first, and it is what QueryWin works on. For the Google half of the same picture, the limits are set out in AI Mode Search Console reporting.

Common questions

Is Bing Webmaster Tools free?

Yes. There is no paid tier for the console, and the AI Performance report is part of it during the preview.

Do I still need Google Search Console?

Yes. The two consoles report on different indexes and different answer surfaces, and neither one substitutes for the other. Google Search Console remains where you read the Google side.

How long until data appears?

Not documented as a fixed number, so plan to check again after a week rather than the same day. Verification is instant; reporting is not.

Does submitting URLs make Bing rank me higher?

No. Submission affects whether and how fast a URL is looked at, not what position it earns. The same distinction holds for IndexNow.

What if my site is already verified in Google Search Console?

Use the import option. Microsoft lists it as one of the five verification methods: "If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, you can import your verified ownership directly." It is the shortest path and needs no change to your site.