What is Bing Webmaster Tools?
Definition
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free toolset that shows site owners how Bing crawls, indexes and ranks their site. Besides search performance, URL inspection, sitemaps, IndexNow submission, backlink and keyword data, it includes AI Performance, which reports how often the site is cited as a source in Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated answers in Bing.
Also known as: BWT, Bing Webmaster, Bing Webmaster Center
Why bother when most traffic comes from Google
Bing's share of searches is small in many markets, so it is easy to ignore. But Bing's index does not only power bing.com; it also feeds Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and a number of partner integrations. A page Bing cannot crawl or has not indexed has no chance of being cited in those answers. Bing Webmaster Tools is the first-party way to see that side, and it complements Google Search Console rather than replacing it.
Getting verified
Once a site is added, ownership can be proven in five ways:
- Import from Search Console. Authorise with your Google account and Bing imports verified sites and their sitemaps, up to 100 sites at a time. Bing re-checks ownership through Search Console periodically, so revoking that access means re-verifying another way.
- Domain Connect, which writes the DNS record automatically at supporting DNS providers.
- An XML file, a meta tag or a DNS record.
Traffic data for a newly verified site can take up to 48 hours to appear.
What is in the toolbox
- Search Performance: impressions, clicks and average position with up to 16 months of data.
- URL Inspection: index status, crawlability, HTTP response and blocked resources for one URL.
- Site Explorer: your folder structure as Bing sees it, including indexed and blocked pages.
- Sitemaps: submission and processing status.
- URL Submission and IndexNow: push changed URLs immediately; submissions made through IndexNow can be monitored here.
- Backlinks and Keyword Research based on Bing's own data.
- Site Scan, a Robots.txt Tester and Crawl Control, which lets you shape when Bingbot crawls hardest.
- Recommendations and a built-in Copilot assistant.
AI Performance: seeing your citations
AI Performance, released as a public preview in February 2026, is where Bing goes further than Google's tooling. It measures how often your site is shown as a source in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and selected partner integrations:
- Total Citations: how many times your content was displayed as a source in the selected period.
- Average Cited Pages: the average number of unique pages cited per day.
- Grounding Queries: the phrases the AI used when retrieving the content it cited.
- Page-level citation activity: which URLs are cited, and how often.
In June 2026 Bing added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare to the preview. They group grounding queries by intent and theme, show your percentage of all citations for a given query, and overlay earlier periods. Together they turn the AI citation, previously something you could only estimate, into a number from a first-party source, which makes this report a practical measurement layer for GEO work (Bing's announcement).
Because these features are in preview, definitions and coverage may still change. Read the figures as trends rather than as precise totals.