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Bing Webmaster Tools for WordPress: setup, IndexNow, and what it means for ChatGPT and Copilot

Microsoft documents that Copilot rests on Bing's index. OpenAI documents its own crawler and does not say a site must be in Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, a WordPress site is verified with one tag or one file, and its AI report shows phrases that Google's does not.

By
WP Ministry
Published
Tested on
WordPress 7.1.3, PHP 8.3.35

In short

  • Microsoft's guidelines say Bing and Copilot rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking. That part is documented.
  • OpenAI documents its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and says ChatGPT search sometimes asks other search providers. It does not say a site must be in Bing.
  • Bing lists four ways to verify a site, and an import from Google Search Console that verifies it for you.
  • On WordPress the meta tag goes in a small must-use plugin and the XML file in the site's root. Neither needs an SEO plugin.
  • IndexNow tells Bing and the protocol's other participants that an address changed. WordPress does not send it by itself, and Google is not on the protocol's list.
  • Bing's AI Performance report shows cited pages and grounding queries, which are grouped phrases and not what people typed.

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free account for site owners. It proves a site is yours, takes its sitemap, and reports what Bing and Copilot did with its pages. It matters beyond Bing for one documented reason: Microsoft says Copilot rests on the same crawling and index as Bing search. For ChatGPT the documented part is narrower. OpenAI says a site is eligible for ChatGPT search when OpenAI's own crawler may reach it, and that ChatGPT search sometimes asks other search providers. It does not say a site has to be in Bing.

Setting a WordPress site up takes one tag or one file. None of it puts a page into an AI answer, and Bing says so itself.

Does being in Bing matter for ChatGPT and Copilot?

Three kinds of statement get mixed together here: what a company documents, what it once announced, and what people infer. Each source was read on October 8, 2026.

StatementWhat it stands onWhere
Copilot rests on Bing's crawling, index and rankingDocumented by MicrosoftBing Webmaster Guidelines, undated. Bing and Copilot "rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation"
A site is eligible for ChatGPT search when OAI-SearchBot may crawl itDocumented by OpenAIIts crawler page, undated, and its help article on searching the web, which adds that placement is not guaranteed
ChatGPT search asks other search providers, Microsoft among themDocumented by OpenAI, in partThe same help article says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, and points to the privacy statements of Microsoft and Shopify for how they handle queries
Bing is the default search experience in ChatGPTAnnounced by Microsoft on May 23, 2023Seventeen months before OpenAI launched ChatGPT search, on October 31, 2024, with a crawler of its own
A page must be in Bing's index to be cited by ChatGPTGuessworkNot said on any page of OpenAI's or Microsoft's read for this guide

OpenAI's help article does not name Bing's index, say how often a partner is asked, or say what a site must do to be in a partner's results. Microsoft is no more specific from its side: Bing's AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot, in AI summaries in Bing and in what it calls "Select partner AI integrations", which it does not name.

So there are two separate jobs. Be in Bing for the sake of Bing and Copilot, where the link is documented. For ChatGPT, do what OpenAI asks and let OAI-SearchBot in: blocking or allowing AI crawlers covers that. Generative engine optimization sets out what every engine documents.

Add your site and prove you own it

Bing's checklist says the account is free and that you can sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account. Its help page then gives two ways to add a site.

Import it from Google Search Console. Bing asks for permission to read your Search Console account and adds the verified sites you pick. The help page says they are verified automatically and that their sitemaps come with them. Bing goes on reading that account from time to time to confirm ownership, until you disconnect it under Profile. Nothing changes on the WordPress site.

Add it by hand, then verify by one of four methods.

MethodWhat Bing's help saysOn the WordPress site
DNS auto verificationBing adds a CNAME record for you after you sign in to your DNS provider. Offered only where the provider supports the Domain Connect standardNothing
XML fileDownload BingSiteAuth.xml, which holds your code, and upload it to the site's root directoryOne upload
Meta tagCopy the <meta /> tag Bing shows you and paste it at the end of the <head> of the site's default pageA few lines of PHP
CNAME recordAdd the record Bing gives you at your DNS hostNothing

Add the site before you need its reports. Bing's help says data usually takes 48 hours to appear after a site is added, and that search data is collected only from the day the site was added, with nothing from before.

The meta tag, without a plugin

Microsoft has a page on verifying a WordPress site, last updated on October 13, 2022. It names the tag, msvalidate.01, and has you install a plugin to print it. WordPress can print it from one small file instead.

A must-use plugin is a PHP file in wp-content/mu-plugins/ that WordPress loads on every request, with nothing to activate. It is a better place than the theme: the file stays when the theme changes, and WordPress's default theme, a block theme, has no header.php to paste a tag into.

  1. Step 1: Create the mu-plugins folder if it is not there

    Look in wp-content. If there is no folder named mu-plugins, create one. A fresh WordPress does not have it.

  2. Step 2: Add the file

    Save this as bing-site-verification.php in that folder. It prints the tag on the home page only, which is where Bing's help says to put it.

    wp-content/mu-plugins/bing-site-verification.php
    <?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Bing site verification
 * Description: Prints the meta tag Bing Webmaster Tools asks for, on the home page.
 */

add_action(
	'wp_head',
	function () {
		if ( is_front_page() ) {
			echo '<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF" />' . "\n";
		}
	}
);

  3. Step 3: Check that the home page carries it

    Run this from any computer with curl, with your own address between the quotes. It prints the verification tag and the page's robots tag, and nothing else.

    bash
    curl -s "https://example.com/" | grep -Eio '<meta name=.(msvalidate\.01|robots|bingbot).[^>]*>'

  4. Step 4: Finish in Bing Webmaster Tools

    Go back to the verification screen and complete the meta tag method there.

On a new WordPress with the file in place, the command printed two lines.

text
<meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large' />
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF" />

With no terminal, search the home page's source in a browser for msvalidate. Bing's help does not say whether the tag may be removed once the site is verified, so leave the file where it is.

The XML file

Bing gives you the file. Upload it unchanged to the site's root, the folder that holds wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes. The web server sends a real file before WordPress is asked, so no setting in WordPress is involved. This command shows what Bing will receive.

bash
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{content_type}\n' "https://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml"

With the file in the root, the test site answered 200 application/xml. Without it the answer was a 404, or a 301 on a site with Plain permalinks, where WordPress redirects the request and then shows the home page. Either means the file is not where Bing will look.

Give Bing the sitemap

Bing's Sitemaps page lists the sitemaps you submitted, those imported from Search Console and those Bing found by itself. Its help names a Sitemap: line in robots.txt as another way to tell Bing, and WordPress writes that line already.

bash
curl -s "https://example.com/robots.txt" | grep -i '^Sitemap:'
text
Sitemap: https://example.com/wp-sitemap.xml

If the command prints nothing, start with the guide to wp-sitemap.xml: the site may have Plain permalinks, a robots.txt file of its own, or an SEO plugin that serves a different sitemap. Submit the address that answers, with the "Submit sitemaps" button. The page then shows when Bing last processed the file, its status and the number of addresses found.

Bing's guidelines ask that a sitemap list only canonical addresses and carry a lastmod date, and say that a sitemap does not guarantee visibility. WordPress's own sitemap gave each post and page a lastmod on the test site. The sitemap checker reads yours from outside.

IndexNow

IndexNow is a way for a site to tell search engines that an address was added, changed or deleted, without waiting to be crawled. The protocol's own site says an engine that receives a submission shares it with the other participants. Its list of participants names seven: Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazon's crawler. Its FAQ gives a submission address for six of them, all but the Internet Archive. Google is on neither list.

Bing leans on it. Its guidelines name IndexNow first among the ways to be discovered, and its help says the older URL submission tools may be retired as IndexNow spreads. Submitting addresses by hand in Bing Webmaster Tools still works, up to 10,000 a day for a domain. The same page says repeated submissions do not speed indexing up.

A submission is a notice and nothing more. The protocol's documentation says an answer of 200 means only that the engine received the address, and its FAQ says submitting does not guarantee immediate indexing.

What a WordPress site needs

WordPress sends nothing to IndexNow by itself: a search of its own files on the test site found no mention of the protocol. There are three ways to add it.

  • Microsoft's plugin. "IndexNow Plugin" on WordPress.org is published by the Bing Webmaster team. Its listing says it makes and hosts the key and submits an address when a page is created, updated or deleted.
  • Something you already run. The protocol's FAQ says to check first whether your SEO plugin or host already supports it, and names one CDN that does, Cloudflare.
  • By hand. A key file on the site, and a request each time an address changes.

The key file

The key proves that whoever submits an address controls the site. The documentation asks for 8 to 128 characters, made of letters, numbers and dashes, in a UTF-8 text file named after the key, in the site's root, holding the key.

0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.txt
0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef
A made-up key. Make your own, name the file after it, and put only the key inside.
bash
curl -s "https://example.com/0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.txt"

The command should print the key and nothing else. The submission itself is a request to the /indexnow address of one participant, naming the changed address and the key. The engine then fetches the key file to check it, and the FAQ says a first request may be answered 202 while it does.

What the reports show

Each line is what Bing's help says the report contains.

ReportWhat it contains
Search PerformanceClicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position for up to six months, by keyword and by page, for web search. Its totals also count links in chat answers. A second view counts crawl requests, crawl errors and indexed pages
AI PerformanceTotal citations, pages cited per day, citations by page, and grounding queries
URL InspectionFor one address: whether it is indexed, when it was crawled, the HTTP response, and a live test of what Bingbot is sent
Site ExplorerThe site by folder, with counts of indexed, error, warning and excluded addresses, and filters for noindex, robots.txt blocks and redirects
Crawl ControlA setting, not a report: how fast Bingbot may crawl in each hour of the day. A crawl-delay in robots.txt takes precedence

AI Performance and grounding queries

Microsoft announced this report as a public preview on February 10, 2026. Its help page says it covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and the unnamed partners above.

Grounding queries are, in the help page's words, the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that it then cited. The page is plain about what they are not: "They are not full user questions or prompts." They are grouped phrases, such as "solar panels" in its own example, each with a count of how often your pages were cited under it. Four further views, which the page calls preview capabilities, sort the phrases by intent and topic, show your share of the citations for a phrase, and compare two periods.

The limits are on the same page: the data is a sample, a citation is not a click, and the report does not measure rankings, authority or importance.

This is what Google's report does not have. Search Console's generative AI report groups impressions by page, country, date and device. Its help page offers no grouping by query.

Where Bing's guidelines differ from Google's

  • noarchive and nocache mean something to Bing. Bing's guidelines say noarchive keeps content out of Copilot's responses and that nocache limits Copilot to the address, title and snippet. Google's specification lists both among rules it ignores. A tag left on a page because Google does nothing with it still keeps that page out of Copilot, by Bing's account.
  • WordPress adds neither to a public page. On the test site the home page's robots tag was max-image-preview:large. A post, a page and a category archive carried neither word, and noarchive was on the login page. If the command in the verification steps prints either word for your pages, a plugin or a snippet put it there.
  • A redirect has a time limit. Bing asks for a 301 when an address moves for good, and a 302 only for changes of less than two days.
  • The trade's term is in the text. The guidelines name generative engine optimization, and list content written to steer the models behind Bing or Copilot among abuses that can get a site removed.

What it does not do

A verified site is not a cited site. Bing's guidelines: "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences."

Verifying proves ownership and opens the reports. Bing's help page on adding a site says nothing about it changing how a site is crawled or ranked. A sitemap and IndexNow tell Bing what exists and what changed, and Bing decides what to index. The reports count what happened and do not say why.

What the account is good for is seeing: whether Bing can crawl the site, which pages it indexed, and whether Copilot has cited any of them. Reading those reports beside Google's is part of WP Ministry's AI search optimization check, a one-time job that covers each place a crawler can be turned away, what Google's and Bing's own reports say, and what to change. For Google's side, see how to appear in AI Overviews.

Common questions

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

They report on different search engines, and neither shows the other's data. If the site is verified in Search Console, Bing can import it from there with no tag or file. Bing's report is also the only one of the two that shows phrases behind AI citations.

Does ChatGPT use Bing?

OpenAI's help article says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, and it links to Microsoft's privacy statement among theirs. It does not say which answers draw on which provider, and it does not name Bing's index. What OpenAI does document for site owners is its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot.

Does Google use IndexNow?

Google is not on the protocol's list of participating search engines, and the protocol's FAQ gives no submission address for it. For Google, the guide to wp-sitemap.xml covers submitting a sitemap in Search Console.

Do I need an llms.txt file for Bing or Copilot?

Bing's guidelines do not mention the file. llms.txt on WordPress has what each company says about it.

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