Bing Webmaster Tools Setup for AI Reporting

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is Microsoft's free console for site owners. For AI search, it does two jobs that no other tool does.

First, it tells you whether Bing has indexed your pages. That matters because the Bing index is the documented backing store for Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing, and Azure's Grounding with Bing Search. If Bing has not indexed a page, those surfaces have nothing to cite.

Second, its AI Performance report (public preview since February 2026, expanded in June 2026) shows citations from Copilot, Bing AI summaries and select partner integrations. It also shows grounding queries: the phrases the AI used when it retrieved your content. Every prompt tracker tests prompts its vendor chose. Grounding queries are the real retrieval input, and as of October 2026 Bing is the only place you can see them. Our guide to seeing which queries Copilot used to cite you covers that view in detail.

What it does not tell you about ChatGPT

OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers" and rewrites your question into targeted queries it sends to them. That is a documented path from the Bing index toward ChatGPT. Nobody has measured how much it contributes. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, two sites that ranked in Bing drew effectively zero ChatGPT citations, even with ChatGPT's crawlers visiting. So read BWT as Microsoft data. If you want the detail, see whether Bing's AI report includes ChatGPT citations.

Plan for 20 to 30 minutes. The menu names below are as of October 2026 and Microsoft does rename things, so follow the labels on screen if they differ.

1. Sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. Use a shared company account, not a personal one that leaves with an employee.
2. Add your site. If you already use Google Search Console, the import option pulls in verified properties and sitemaps in one step. Otherwise, enter your site URL manually.
3. Verify ownership if you did not import. The usual choices are an XML file at your site root, a meta tag in your homepage head, or a DNS record. DNS is the most durable because a site redesign will not remove it. The meta tag looks like this:

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR-CODE" />

4. Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps. Submit the index file if you have several. Also list it in robots.txt so any crawler can find it:

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

5. Confirm bingbot can reach you. Check that robots.txt does not disallow bingbot. Then check your CDN or firewall. A firewall can return 403 to a crawler that robots.txt allows, and nothing in BWT will label that clearly.
6. Add teammates under user management, with read access for anyone who only needs reports.
7. Wait a few days. Index and AI data fill in over time. Do not judge a brand-new property on day one.

IndexNow is optional here. It notifies Bing and six other engines (not Google) when URLs change. Its specification never mentions AI, and a 200 response confirms only that the ping arrived. Our IndexNow setup guide explains what it does and does not do.

Start with access and indexing, then move to AI. A citation report means nothing if your key pages are not in the index.

Indexing and URL inspection

Inspect your homepage, pricing page, main product pages and your top comparison or category page. For each, confirm Bing has indexed it and sees the canonical you intended. Look for blocked-by-robots, noindex or crawl errors.

Crawl and sitemap status

Check that your sitemap was read without errors and that submitted URLs are being discovered. A large gap between submitted and indexed URLs is the first thing to investigate.

AI Performance

This is the report you came for. Note Total Citations, Average Cited Pages, which pages get cited, and the grounding queries behind them. Intents and Topics group that activity. Two cautions apply:

• Microsoft says the grounding query data is "a sample of overall citation activity." That note sits in the grounding queries subsection, so do not assume the whole report is sampled. Our page on whether Bing's AI data is sampled breaks this down.
• Microsoft describes Citation Share as "an observational metric, not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard." It can fall while your absolute citations rise, because the denominator is dominated by whoever already wins the query.

For a full walkthrough of every panel, read how to read Bing's AI Performance report.

Snippet controls on your pages

Since October 2025, Bing honors data-nosnippet. Content marked with it is still indexed but excluded from snippets and AI summaries. Templates often carry it by accident, for example around a pricing table. See Bing's data-nosnippet support for how it works.

Work through this list once at setup, then keep it for your monthly review.

• Site verified, ideally by DNS, under a shared company account
• XML sitemap submitted in BWT and listed in robots.txt
• robots.txt allows bingbot on every section you want in AI answers
• Firewall or CDN returns 200, not 403 or a challenge page, to bingbot
• Homepage, pricing and core product pages inspected and indexed
• No unintended noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 or data-nosnippet on key content
• Key facts (prices, plan names, what you do) present in the HTML before JavaScript runs
• AI Performance totals, top cited pages and top grounding queries exported or screenshotted with today's date
• A note of any site changes planned in the next month, so you can line them up against the data

That dated export is your baseline. Without it you cannot tell later whether a change helped, hurt or did nothing. Our guide to setting an AI visibility baseline covers what else to record.

Your first look at BWT will fall into one of a few patterns. Here is how to read each one and what to do next.

A healthy Bing result tells you nothing about Google. In Otterly's experiment, Google deindexed both test sites while Bing kept them, and Microsoft Copilot supplied 2,718 of the 3,934 citations Otterly tracked for one site. Check each engine's console separately.

One more pattern is worth knowing. In the same test, Microsoft's own AI Performance report counted 42,817 citations for that site, more than ten times what Otterly's prompt tracker logged. The windows may not match exactly. It still shows that a first-party count sees far more than any prompt sample.

BWT is not a set-and-forget tool. Indexing and access break quietly, usually after someone else changes something.

• Monthly: recheck index status for your key pages, export AI Performance totals and top grounding queries, and compare against last month's baseline.
• After any release that touches templates, rendering or robots.txt: inspect the affected URLs within a week. Accidental noindex or data-nosnippet usually ships this way.
• After any CDN, firewall or bot-management change: confirm bingbot still gets a 200. For a quick outside view of which crawlers your edge turns away, the AI Crawler Checker requests a page as each AI crawler.
• Quarterly: review which pages earn citations and whether your most important facts are on them.

Keep exports with dates. As of August 2026, Microsoft offers no API for the AI Performance data, so your own saved history is the only trend line you will have.

Setting up BWT gives you visibility into Microsoft's index and AI citations. It does not make Copilot cite you. Microsoft decides which retrieved pages to use.

What is in your control is access: bingbot can fetch the page, Bing indexes it, no snippet control hides it, and the fact you want quoted is stated plainly in the HTML. Those are the levers with documented mechanisms behind them. Schema, llms.txt and "AI-friendly" rewriting are not. For the full picture of the levers you hold, read what is in your hands for Copilot citations.