Not for the reason you have probably read. Bing is not the back door into ChatGPT: OpenAI's own documentation no longer names Bing anywhere. Bing earns the work on its own merits, because Copilot grounds its answers on it, its guidelines are the most specific either search engine publishes about AI grounding, and its AI Performance report is one of the few places a vendor tells you an assistant cited you. Blue Crane Works, in Hamilton, Ontario, sets it up.
First, the myth: does ChatGPT run on Bing?
It did once, and almost everything written about this still says so. It is not what OpenAI documents now. We rendered OpenAI's ChatGPT search page on 19 September 2026 and searched the text: it mentions Bing zero times. It says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers" and names none of them, and it states eligibility purely in terms of allowing OpenAI's own crawler and its IP ranges. We walk through that in does ChatGPT use Bing or Google.
We are correcting ourselves here: an earlier version of this article led with the Bing dependency as settled fact. It is not, and a reason to do something should be a real one. The good news is that the practical advice below did not change at all, because Bing was always worth doing for reasons that have nothing to do with OpenAI. Most Canadian small businesses have never verified their site with Bing, never submitted a sitemap to it, and have no idea whether it has crawled them.
Why does Bing Webmaster Tools matter more than Bing's market share?
Three reasons, all documented. First, Bing's Webmaster Guidelines now describe how it "discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates, and surfaces content across Bing search experiences, Copilot, and grounding API results." It is the one search engine that states in writing what makes a page eligible to be cited by an assistant. Second, verifying the site is how you submit a sitemap and see what Bing has actually indexed. Third, in February 2026 Bing shipped an AI Performance report inside Webmaster Tools that shows citation counts per URL and the "grounding queries" Copilot generated to retrieve your content. Google offers no equivalent; Google's own documentation says traffic from AI features is folded into the ordinary Web row of Search Console with no separate line. If the question is "is an AI citing us," Bing is where the answer lives, and it needs a verified site.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is a protocol for telling search engines a URL changed, instead of waiting to be crawled. One request reaches every participating engine, because they "agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines." The current participant list is Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google does not participate; Google discovery stays sitemap plus Search Console. For a site that wants Copilot to be able to cite it, IndexNow is the direct line to the index that does the grounding.
The mechanics are small. You host a key file at the root of the site, then send one request per changed URL. Bing's guidelines ask that you do it that way rather than in bulk: "Avoid batch submissions when possible. Streaming submissions provide faster updates, reduce server load, and improve indexing accuracy."
| Response | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 200 | Accepted. |
| 202 | Accepted, key validation pending. Normal on a brand-new key; ping again later. |
| 400 | Bad request format. |
| 403 | Invalid key. |
| 422 | The URL does not belong to the host, or the key does not match. |
| 429 | Too many requests. Slow down. |
What does this look like on a real site?
On this site every deploy submits the changed URLs automatically, so a page edited in the morning is known to Bing before lunch, and the key file that authorises the submission sits at the root where the protocol requires it. That is the whole setup: a key, a sitemap, a verified property, and a ping on publish. A site that does none of those waits for Bing to find it, which can take weeks, and Copilot waits with it.
What about Google?
Google's route is the sitemap and Search Console. Two facts from Google's sitemap documentation save a lot of wasted effort: Google "ignores the priority and changefreq values" many tools still generate, and it uses the lastmod date only if it is "consistently and verifiably accurate." A sitemap that stamps today's date on every page teaches Google to ignore the field. Keep the dates honest and submit the file once; Google does the rest on its own schedule.
Where this fits
Getting into Bing's index is one of several checks, and not the first. The one that comes first is whether the crawlers can reach and read the site at all, covered in can ChatGPT see my website. The second is whether a forgotten directive is forbidding citation, covered in the two settings that hide a website from AI answers. All three are done, verified and reported in the AI Visibility Pass, and on a managed website they are included from the day it launches. And the limit, in Bing's own words, applies to all of it: "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences." Being in the index is the precondition, not the prize.
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