Bing index

Bing's market share made it ignorable for a decade; its role behind AI surfaces ends that. When ChatGPT searches on a buyer's behalf, the candidate pages come from indexes, OpenAI's own plus partner providers including Bing, so a site Bing has never properly crawled starts those answers at a structural disadvantage no amount of content quality repairs. The corrective work is old-fashioned and quick precisely because everyone stopped doing it: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, check the index coverage report for pages Bing skipped, and fix what it flags. Add IndexNow and changes reach the index at push speed. There is also a diagnostic dividend: Bing Webmaster Tools shows you your site as Microsoft's crawler sees it, which approximates what downstream AI surfaces inherit, and its reports are one of the few free windows into that layer. An hour of setup and a monthly glance keep one of AEO's load-bearing dependencies from staying invisible to you.