How to Submit a URL to Bing (and Get It Indexed)

The fastest way to get a URL into Bing is to verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (importing it from Google Search Console takes about a minute), submit your sitemap, and then notify Bing of new or changed URLs through IndexNow or the URL Submission tool. Bing is much more open to direct submission than Google: per-site quotas are generous, and IndexNow accepts up to 10,000 URLs per request. As with any search engine, submission gets a page crawled. It does not guarantee the page is indexed.

Why spend time on Bing

Bing's own share of search is modest in most countries, but its index travels. It supplies web results to DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Ecosia, among others, and it is a source for Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT search. A page that is missing from Bing is missing from all of those. The work involved is small, and once it is set up it runs by itself.

Step 1: add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools

Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. You get two options.

Option A: import from Google Search Console

This is the quick route if your site is already verified in Search Console.

1. Choose Import under "Import your sites from GSC".
2. Sign in with the Google account that has access to the property, and grant Bing permission to read your Search Console data.
3. Select the sites you want and confirm.

Bing imports the sites and their submitted sitemaps and treats them as verified, with no file or DNS record needed. Bing re-checks the connection with your Google account from time to time, so if you later remove that Google account's access to the Search Console property, verification in Bing can lapse. Adding a second, independent verification method afterwards is a sensible precaution.

Option B: add the site manually

Enter the site URL and pick one of the verification methods:

Method	What you do
XML file	Upload the BingSiteAuth.xml file Bing gives you to the root of the site
Meta tag	Add <meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_CODE"> to the <head> of the homepage
DNS	Add the CNAME record Bing gives you at your DNS provider

DNS verification survives redesigns and CMS changes, so prefer it if you have access to DNS.

Step 2: submit your sitemap

A sitemap is how Bing learns about all of your URLs, not only the ones you push.

1. In Bing Webmaster Tools, open Sitemaps.
2. Click Submit sitemap and enter the full URL, for example https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Come back later to check the status and the number of URLs discovered.

If you imported from Search Console, your sitemaps are probably already listed. Also reference the sitemap in robots.txt, which Bing reads like every other major crawler:

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

Bing has been vocal about one detail: it wants accurate <lastmod> values, and uses them to decide what to recrawl. If yours are all set to the generation date, fix that first. See lastmod best practices. For format and limits, see the XML sitemap guide.

Step 3: submit individual URLs

The URL Submission tool

For a handful of URLs:

1. Open URL Submission in the left menu.
2. Click Submit URLs.
3. Paste one URL per line and submit.

The page shows your remaining daily and monthly quota and a history of what you submitted. The quota differs per site. Use it for new pages, substantially updated pages, and pages you removed or redirected.

IndexNow (recommended for anything automated)

IndexNow is the protocol Bing co-developed for change notifications, and Bing recommends it as the primary way to tell it about new, updated and deleted URLs. Setup in short:

1. Generate a key and host it at https://www.example.com/<key>.txt.
2. When URLs change, send them:

curl -X POST "https://www.bing.com/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "host": "www.example.com",
    "key": "7e3f9c0a5b1d4e2f8a6c0d9b3e1f7a25",
    "urlList": [
      "https://www.example.com/new-article",
      "https://www.example.com/updated-pricing"
    ]
  }'

A 200 or 202 response means the URLs were received. One request may contain up to 10,000 URLs, and the submission is shared with the other IndexNow search engines. The key file rules, response codes and common failures are covered in the IndexNow guide.

Before writing code, check whether your platform already does this. Cloudflare (through its Crawler Hints setting), WordPress (through Microsoft's IndexNow plugin and several SEO plugins), Wix and Duda can send IndexNow notifications for you. For occasional use, paste URLs into the IndexNow Submitter. TurboIndex sends IndexNow notifications automatically for new and changed sitemap URLs on connected sites, in addition to its Google submissions.

Bing Webmaster Tools has an IndexNow page that lists the URLs it received through the protocol, which is the easiest way to confirm that your integration works.

The URL Submission API

Before IndexNow, Bing offered its own submission API, and it still works. You create an API key under Settings, then API access, and post JSON:

curl -X POST "https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/SubmitUrlbatch?apikey=YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "siteUrl": "https://www.example.com",
    "urlList": [
      "https://www.example.com/new-article",
      "https://www.example.com/updated-pricing"
    ]
  }'

It is tied to your Webmaster Tools account and counts against the same quota as manual submission. For a new integration, IndexNow is the better choice: there is no account-bound API key, and it reaches several engines at once.

Which method when

Situation	Best method
New site, first setup	Import from GSC, then submit the sitemap
One or two new pages	URL Submission tool
CMS that publishes daily	IndexNow from a publish hook or plugin
Large catalogue with frequent price or stock changes	IndexNow, batched, changed URLs only
Deleted or redirected pages	IndexNow or URL Submission, so Bing recrawls and sees the 404, 410 or 301
Full inventory of URLs	Sitemap

Step 4: check whether it worked

URL Inspection. Enter a URL in the inspection box at the top of Bing Webmaster Tools. It reports whether the URL is indexed, when it was last crawled, and any crawl, indexing or markup issues Bing found. A live test option fetches the page right now and tells you whether Bing is able to index it.

Site Explorer. A folder-style view of all URLs Bing knows on your site, with filters for indexed, error, redirected and excluded URLs. Useful for spotting an entire section that is missing.

A site: query. Searching Bing for site:example.com/path gives a rough picture. Like Google's version of the operator, it is not an exact count.

When Bing crawls the URL and still does not index it

Bing's guidelines describe what it wants: content with clear value, a crawlable site and earned links. Compared with Google, a few differences are worth knowing when you debug:

• Robots.txt groups. If you have a User-agent: bingbot group, Bingbot follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. Copy shared rules into it. Bing also honours Crawl-delay, and a high value seriously limits how many pages it fetches per day. Remove the directive unless you need it, and test your rules with the Robots.txt Tester.
• Blocked by the firewall. Bot protection rules that allow Googlebot sometimes block Bingbot. Bing publishes its crawler IP ranges, and Webmaster Tools includes a "Verify Bingbot" tool for checking an IP address.
• JavaScript. Bing can render JavaScript but advises against depending on it for important content and links. Server-rendered HTML is the safe option. See JavaScript SEO.
• Thin or duplicated content. Bing tends to be stricter than people expect about indexing large numbers of near identical pages. Many submitted URLs from one template staying out of the index is a content signal, not a submission problem.
• Meta tags. Bing respects noindex, canonical tags and the usual robots directives. Check the page with the Indexability Checker.
• New domains. A brand new domain with no inbound links can take a while to earn trust, whatever you submit.

What not to do

• Do not resubmit the same unchanged URLs every day. IndexNow may answer with 429, and the URL Submission quota is there for real changes.
• Do not submit URLs that redirect, return errors, or carry noindex, unless the purpose is to make Bing notice a removal.
• Do not rely on the old sitemap ping URL (bing.com/ping?sitemap=). Anonymous pings were retired.
• Do not skip account setup and rely on IndexNow alone. It works, but you would be flying blind without the reports.
• Do not expect any of this to affect Google. For Google, the equivalent steps are in how to get Google to index your site.

A sensible setup takes about fifteen minutes: import from Search Console, confirm the sitemap, switch on IndexNow in your CMS or CDN, and check URL Inspection for a few key pages a day later.