How to Submit Your Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing powers about 9% of desktop search and also powers DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia, and several other search engines. Submitting your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools ensures all of these search engines can discover and index your pages efficiently. The process is straightforward and takes about 10 minutes.
Step 1: Create a Bing Webmaster Tools Account
Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft account. If you already have a Google Search Console account, Bing offers a shortcut: you can import your sites directly from Google Search Console by clicking Import from Google Search Console during the setup. This saves you from re-verifying your site manually if you have already verified it in Google.
Step 2: Add and Verify Your Site
Click Add a Site and enter your domain. Bing offers three verification methods: XML file (download a small file and upload it to your website root), Meta tag (add a meta tag to your homepage head section), or CNAME record (add a DNS record). The meta tag method is usually fastest. Copy the meta tag Bing gives you and paste it inside the head tag of your homepage, then click Verify. If you imported from Google Search Console, verification is handled automatically.
Step 3: Submit Your Sitemap
Once verified, go to your site dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools. Click Sitemaps in the left menu. Click Submit Sitemap, enter your sitemap URL (for example: yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), and click Submit. Bing will fetch and process the sitemap. Unlike Google Search Console, Bing also accepts sitemap submissions via a simple GET request to: bing.com/ping?sitemap=yoursite.com/sitemap.xml - you can automate this on each site deploy.
Step 4: Reading Your Bing Sitemap Reports
Bing Webmaster Tools shows you how many URLs from your sitemap were crawled and indexed. It also highlights any errors. Common errors include URLs returning non-200 status codes, URLs blocked by robots.txt, and malformed sitemap XML. The interface is similar to Google Search Console but with Bing-specific metrics like Crawl Control (where you can limit how aggressively Bing crawls your site to avoid server load).
Bonus: IndexNow Protocol
Bing supports the IndexNow protocol, which lets you instantly notify Bing when a page is created, updated, or deleted - without waiting for the next crawl. Submit a POST request to api.indexnow.org with your URL and an API key (generate one in Bing Webmaster Tools under the IndexNow section). Yoast SEO, RankMath, and several CMS plugins support IndexNow natively, so you may already be using it without realizing it.