How to Get Your Business Website Indexed on Bing, and Why an Hour Is Enough

A firm outside Kilkenny services and calibrates commercial kitchen equipment. Combi ovens, pass-through dishwashers, blast chillers, the machinery a hotel kitchen cannot trade a single service without. Their customers are not consumers browsing on a Saturday. They are head chefs, facilities managers and maintenance leads, and they go looking at eight in the morning with a cold room reading four degrees too warm.

This is a composite case, built from a pattern we see often enough in our own support queue to be worth writing down properly.

The firm had done the sensible things. Proper website, real service pages, a Google Business Profile, a Search Console account they logged into occasionally. Then a hotel group they had quoted for twice went elsewhere, and the maintenance lead mentioned, without any particular edge to it, that when he had gone looking for a second opinion on a compressor fault he had not been able to find them.

He had been searching at his desk. On a work laptop. In the browser it came with.

The check that takes four seconds

There is a quick way to see what any search engine holds about you. Type site: followed by your domain, with no space after the colon, and read the result count.

Do it on Google. Then do it on the other one.

For this firm the gap was not subtle. Google held the full site, every service page, every location page, the lot. The second index had the home page and one other, both several versions out of date. Their newest and most commercially useful pages, the ones covering emergency refrigeration call-outs, simply were not there. Not ranked badly. Absent.

Nobody had done anything wrong. That is the part worth sitting with. There was no penalty, no misconfiguration, no crawler being blocked. What was missing was an entire discovery pipeline that had never been set up, because nobody had ever mentioned to them that it existed.

Why one index gets fed and the other starves

Think about how a website actually gets found by Google. You verify the property in the free Google tool that shows where your site stands in search, you submit a sitemap, WordPress regenerates that sitemap every time you publish, and the crawler works through it. It is a supply line, and once it is connected it runs by itself.

Now list everything in that process that touches any other search engine.

Nothing does. Not one step.

The second index has to find you the old-fashioned way, by following links from sites it already crawls. For a consumer brand with press coverage and directory listings, that works reasonably well. A business-to-business service firm whose reputation travels by phone call and site visit may have almost no links to follow at all. So the crawler arrives rarely, indexes shallowly, and nobody ever notices because there is no report to notice it in.

That is the mechanism. A supply line on one side, and on the other, weather.

Who is actually searching over there

Now, the honest numbers, because this is where these articles usually oversell.

Statcounter's July 2026 panel data for Ireland puts Google at 94.23% of search, Bing at 3.4%, Yahoo at 0.87%, DuckDuckGo at 0.84%, Ecosia at 0.34% and Yandex at 0.15% ^[1]. Panel measurement, so treat it as the shape of the market rather than a census. Google is dominant and nothing in this article changes that.

But the shares understate the reach of the index behind them, because several of those engines are not building their own.

DuckDuckGo states it plainly in its own documentation: for traditional links and images, "we largely source from Bing", alongside its own crawler and other feeds ^[2]. Ecosia's help centre lists its providers as Microsoft Bing, Google and its own European index, and is explicit that the European index is currently available in France only, with other countries to follow ^[3]. So an Irish user on Ecosia is being served by one of the two large indexes, not the European alternative.

Then there is the newer surface. Microsoft's documentation for Copilot describes the mechanism directly: when a prompt would benefit from web information, Copilot generates a search query and sends it to the Bing search service to ground the answer ^[4]. That is not a ranking question. It is an inventory question. A page that is not in the index cannot be retrieved, cannot be summarised, and cannot be quoted back to the person asking which firms service commercial refrigeration in the south east.

Add it up and roughly one search in twenty in Ireland runs through infrastructure most business owners have never submitted a single URL to. The share is small. The composition is not random.

It skews towards work.

Consider what that means for the service firm on an ordinary Tuesday. A facilities manager with a walk-in fridge climbing above safe temperature has maybe ninety seconds of patience and a purchasing process that requires three quotes. He types the search into whatever opens when he clicks the blue e on the taskbar. Three companies come back. He rings all three. The one that was never indexed is not in that shortlist, does not know the search happened, and will never see a line in any analytics report explaining the quiet Tuesday.

That is the cost. Not a ranking drop you can diagnose. An absence you cannot measure.

The hour that fixes it

We walked the firm through this on a call. Start to finish it took less than an hour, and most of that was waiting for a page to load.

Import. Bing Webmaster Tools lets you bring your already-verified properties across from Google Search Console instead of verifying from scratch, up to a hundred sites at a time ^[5]. Two clicks and a permission prompt. If you would rather not connect the accounts, a meta tag or a DNS record does the same job.

Submit. Give it the sitemap URL your site already generates, usually your domain followed by /sitemap.xml or /wp-sitemap.xml. This is the step that converts weather back into a supply line, and it is the single highest-value thing on this list.

Automate. Install the IndexNow plugin, published free by the Bing Webmaster team, which generates the key file, hosts it on your site and submits every new, updated or deleted URL in the background. It has over 100,000 active installations on WordPress. Several of the large SEO plugins now include the same function, so check before adding a second one. The participating engines listed by the IndexNow project are Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon ^[6].

Verify. Come back in a fortnight and read the index coverage and crawl error reports. Microsoft's own comparison of the two toolsets notes that its reporting covers web search, chat and Copilot responses, news, images and knowledge panels ^[5], which is a broader view than you get elsewhere.

None of these steps require a developer, and none of them require permission from your host, provided your host lets you install a plugin and edit your own site. That is a low bar and a surprising number of platforms fail it. It is one of the reasons we build on full WordPress rather than a closed builder, and why everything a business site needs to be found and stay online is bundled into one €60 a year platform instead of being sold back to you a feature at a time.

What this will not do

A reality check, because the version of this advice you will read elsewhere tends to skip it.

IndexNow does not guarantee anything. The project's own documentation says so directly: "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing", every submitted URL counts against your site's crawl quota, and the protocol is intended for recently changed pages rather than for firing your entire site at the endpoint in one go ^[6]. Submit thoughtfully and it works quietly. Abuse it and you are spending crawl budget to no purpose.

It will not help you on Google either. Google does not participate, and there is no back door here.

Being indexed is also not the same as ranking. If a crawler reaches a page that takes eleven seconds to render, or finds three near-identical service pages competing with each other, indexing it faster only means the weakness is discovered sooner. The underlying performance work that makes a site worth crawling in the first place does not become optional because you added a second index.

And here is the concession, given plainly. If you have one hour a month to spend on search visibility, spend it on Google. 94% is 94%, and no amount of enthusiasm about alternative engines changes that arithmetic. The argument for the work described here is not that it competes for that hour, but that it never asks for a second one. Set it up and the supply line runs on its own.

We learned that lesson the slow way ourselves. Our deployment checklist used to re-verify a migrated site in Search Console and stop there, which meant the second index kept serving a customer's old host for weeks after the move. Both verifications are on the checklist now. It was a five-minute omission that cost somebody visibility they did not know they had.

Where it landed

Within a couple of weeks the Kilkenny firm's service pages were showing up in the second index. Not top of the page, not transformed, just present, which is the only outcome an hour's administration is entitled to claim.

The genuinely useful part was something else. The crawl report flagged a set of pages returning errors that had gone unnoticed for months, a leftover from a plugin change. That is the incidental value of a second opinion on your own site. Two free tools looking at the same website from different angles catch different things, and the one you do not check is the one holding the finding you needed.

They also stopped guessing. Before, the question "are we findable?" had one answer, drawn from one source. Now it has two, and when a maintenance lead says he could not find them, there is somewhere to look rather than a shrug.

Conclusion

Most search advice asks you to compete. This does not. It asks you to be present in a place where the competition is thinner and the effort is a fixed, one-off hour rather than an ongoing programme.

The deeper habit is worth more than the hour. Your website is a business asset with several front doors, and it is entirely possible to keep one of them beautifully maintained while another has never been unlocked. Once a quarter, run the site: check on both, glance at both reports, and confirm that what you believe about your own visibility is still true.

Four seconds tells you whether the rest of it is worth an afternoon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Bing actually matter for an Irish business?

It matters in proportion. Statcounter's July 2026 panel data for Ireland puts Google at just over 94% and Bing at roughly 3.4%, with DuckDuckGo and Ecosia adding smaller shares on top. That is somewhere around one search in twenty happening outside Google, and a meaningful slice of it on machines at work where Microsoft software is the default. Nobody should rebuild a marketing plan around 3%. Nobody should leave it entirely unfed either, particularly when the setup is a one-off hour.

Do I need Bing Webmaster Tools if I already use Google Search Console?

They are separate systems reporting on separate indexes, so one tells you nothing about the other. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and you can import your already-verified properties straight from Search Console rather than repeating the verification. Microsoft's own comparison notes that its reporting spans web search, chat and Copilot responses, news, images and knowledge panels, which is a wider surface than a Google-only view.

What is IndexNow and do I need a plugin for it?

IndexNow is an open protocol that pings participating search engines the moment a page is published, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for a crawler to notice. The participating engines listed by the project are Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon. On WordPress you do not have to touch code: the Bing Webmaster team publishes a free IndexNow plugin with over 100,000 active installations that generates the key and submits URLs automatically, and several major SEO plugins include the same function.

Does Google support IndexNow?

No. Google is not among the participating search engines listed by the IndexNow project, and Google discovery still runs on crawling, sitemaps and Search Console. So IndexNow is an addition to your Google setup, never a replacement for it. If a plugin or agency implies that installing IndexNow speeds up Google indexing, treat that as a reason to check the rest of their claims.

Will getting indexed on Bing improve my Google rankings?

It will not. The two indexes are built and ranked independently, and nothing you submit to one is visible to the other. The honest case for doing it is not ranking gain: it is coverage of the searches you currently cannot see, plus a second free diagnostic view of your own site that occasionally flags a crawl problem before the tool you normally watch does.

How do I check whether my website is indexed on Bing?

Open Bing and search for site: followed by your domain, with no space, then do the same on Google and compare the rough number of results. A handful of pages on one and dozens on the other tells you the second index has found you but never worked through the site. Nothing at all tells you the crawler has never had a reason to visit, which usually means no sitemap submission and few inbound links.

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