How to Submit Your Site to Bing in 2026 (IndexNow Explained)

To submit your site to Bing, use IndexNow. Publish a small verification key file on your domain, then send your new and changed URLs to the IndexNow endpoint. Bing crawls them soon after, usually within hours, and the same submission also reaches Yandex, Seznam and Naver. You can also submit URLs by hand inside Bing Webmaster Tools and keep an XML sitemap that Bing reads on its own schedule. All three are official, and none of them can force Bing to index a page, only to discover it faster.

Most teams pour their entire indexing effort into Google and treat Bing as the engine they will get to later. That was defensible when Bing was a rounding error. It is not one now: Bing powers its own search, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and a growing share of the answers that Copilot and other AI assistants hand back to people who are ready to buy. A page that is missing from Bing is missing from more places than the name implies. The good news is that Bing made submission genuinely easy, and once it is set up it runs on its own.

How do I submit my website to Bing?

The fastest official route is IndexNow. It is a simple protocol Bing built so that you can tell it the moment a URL is published or changed, instead of waiting for it to rediscover the page. There are three practical ways to get your pages into Bing, and the right answer is usually all three working together.

If you only do one thing, set up IndexNow. It carries the real-time load, and a tool that handles Bing URL submission through IndexNow for you will fire off every new page automatically the second it goes live.

How do I set up IndexNow for Bing?

Setting up IndexNow takes about ten minutes. Generate an API key, which is just a random string. Save that key in a text file named after the key itself and place it at the root of your site, so it is reachable at yourdomain.com/yourkey.txt. Then, whenever a URL changes, send a small request to the IndexNow endpoint listing your host, the key, the key file location, and the URLs. That is the whole mechanism. On WordPress you rarely do this by hand, because most SEO plugins handle it, and our comparison of IndexNow WordPress plugins by price and logging shows which ones do it for free. Once it is running, an IndexNow checker that verifies the key file and each submission tells you whether it keeps working. Outside WordPress, a headless or custom stack can call an IndexNow API that also submits to Google and returns index status from the same publish hook.

You can submit a single URL or a batch of up to 10,000 in one call. If you send requests too quickly you may get a 429 response, which simply means slow the rate down, not that anything is broken. A 403 or 422 is different and does need a fix, and our page on the "Error submitting page to IndexNow" message maps every response code to its cause. Because IndexNow is a shared protocol, one submission reaches every participating engine at once, so the effort you spend on Bing quietly buys you Yandex, Seznam and Naver too. For a deeper walkthrough of the protocol and where it fits, see our guide to the IndexNow submission tool.

Does Google use IndexNow?

No. Google has said plainly that it does not use IndexNow, so submitting there does nothing for your Google coverage. We dug into the statements and the testing behind that in does Google use IndexNow. This is the single most important thing to understand about Bing submission: the two engines run on separate systems. Submitting to IndexNow reaches Bing and its partners, and submitting through the Google Indexing API or Search Console reaches Google. Neither one covers the other.

That separation is exactly why running both matters instead of picking one. Teams that only work on Google leave Bing coverage to chance, and teams that discover IndexNow sometimes assume it handles everything and quietly lose Google visibility. Treat them as two parallel workflows: a Google path built on a clean XML sitemap and the URL Inspection tool, and a Bing path built on IndexNow. A combined tool runs both at once so neither engine becomes a blind spot.

How long does Bing take to index a page after submission?

With IndexNow, Bing usually crawls a submitted URL within a few hours, sometimes faster. Crawling is not the same as indexing, though. After Bing fetches the page it still runs its own quality checks, so indexing can take longer, and a thin or duplicate page may never be indexed no matter how many times you submit it. Submission speeds up discovery; the decision to index stays with Bing. That is why the step after submitting is checking: a bulk Bing index checker shows which of the URLs you sent Bing actually kept, next to their Google status.

Without submission, discovery depends on Bing recrawling your sitemap or following a link to the page, which can take days or weeks on a site it does not crawl often. That gap is the entire reason to submit: you move discovery from an unpredictable wait to a matter of hours, which is what keeps a fresh page in the running while the topic is still worth ranking for.

Why bother submitting to Bing at all?

Because the traffic is real and the buyers are increasingly there. Bing users skew toward desktop, work accounts and older, higher-income households in the United States, which is exactly the profile that converts on paid software. On top of that, the AI assistants people now use to shortlist tools lean on Bing's index for their web answers, so being in Bing is part of being cited when someone asks an assistant for the best tool in your category.

Getting indexed is the first step, but it is worth knowing whether that visibility actually turns into mentions where your buyers look. If you want to see where your brand actually surfaces across search results, social platforms and the wider web, a brand monitoring tool that tracks your name across the web closes that loop after the indexing work is done. Index first, then watch what the coverage earns you.

What is the difference between IndexNow and the Bing URL submission tool?

They are two doors to the same room. IndexNow is a protocol you call automatically from your own site or a tool, ideal for pushing every change the instant it happens without anyone clicking a button. The Bing Webmaster URL submission feature is a manual control inside Bing Webmaster Tools, useful when you want to submit a specific page by hand or you have not wired up IndexNow yet. Both allow up to 10,000 URLs per day for most verified sites, so the choice is about automation, not capacity.

In practice, most sites should verify in Bing Webmaster Tools once, set up IndexNow for automatic real-time submission, and keep a clean sitemap as the baseline. That combination covers instant pushes, manual overrides and steady background crawling If you are covering Google in the same pass, the channels and their limits differ by engine, which is laid out in how to submit a URL to search engines.

The honest bottom line

Submitting your site to Bing is quick, official and worth doing, and IndexNow makes it close to effortless once it is set up. Verify your site, publish an IndexNow key, and send your URLs on every change. What you cannot do is force Bing to index anything, and any service that promises guaranteed Bing indexing is selling something that does not exist. Submit through the approved channels, confirm the result in Bing Webmaster Tools, and treat any page that stays unindexed as a signal to improve the page rather than resubmit it. Done that way, Bing stops being the engine you forgot and starts being the half of search your competitors ignored. When you are ready to automate it alongside Google, our Bing URL submission workflow runs both engines from one place.