Bing Search Console

Bing Search Console, which Microsoft officially calls [Bing Webmaster Tools](/bing-webmaster-tools/), does one thing better than any alternative I have used: it gives you crawl data that is genuinely different from Google's. I run both tools on every site I manage, and at least twice a year Bing surfaces a 404 or a redirect loop that Google Search Console has been silent about. The most recent example was a staging environment that Google's indexing system had accidentally treated as canonical. Bing flagged it in its 'Blocked URLs' report within 48 hours. Google took 11 days.

The tool also handles sitemap submission more transparently than Google. You upload your sitemap via the dedicated tab and Bing tells you exactly how many URLs it discovered, how many it has indexed, and how many it rejected. Google lumps these numbers into an aggregate 'submitted' count that often requires extra clicks to break down. For a site with 10,000+ pages, that detail saves me about 20 minutes per audit.

Another area where I keep coming back is the keyword data. Bing's search query report shows the exact queries that triggered impressions, along with average position and click-through rate. The volumes are smaller than Google's — my largest Bing-powered client gets about 4 percent of its total search traffic from Bing — but the long-tail queries are often less competitive. I have found keywords ranking on page one of Bing that on Google sit below position 30. [Microsoft Clarity](/microsoft-clarity/) integrates directly with this data, letting me watch session recordings of users who arrived from those Bing queries. That combination of search and user behaviour data is something Google Search Console still charges for via Google Analytics 4.

Verification is straightforward: you can use an HTML meta tag, upload an XML file, or add a DNS TXT record. I prefer the DNS method because it survives theme changes and plugin updates. Once verified, you get access to a set of [SEO tools](/seo-tools/) that include crawl controls, geo-targeting, and a 'Fetch as Bingbot' feature that lets you request immediate indexing of up to 10 URLs per day. For a site launching a time-sensitive piece of content, that daily quota is enough to get the most important pages into Bing's index within hours.

For all its strengths, Bing Search Console has blind spots that make it awkward as a standalone tool. The most frustrating is data volume. Even on sites where Bing is a meaningful traffic source — say, 8–10 percent of organic visits — the query report often shows fewer than 100 rows of data for a 30-day period. Google Search Console gives you 1,000 rows by default and lets you download up to 100,000. That difference matters when you are trying to identify keyword opportunities or diagnose a traffic drop. I once spent an hour trying to reconcile a Bing traffic dip only to realise the tool had sampled the date range differently from Google. I could not export enough rows to confirm the pattern.

Another awkward edge case is international targeting. Bing's geo-targeting settings are more manual than Google's. You have to tell Bing which country your site targets, and if you serve multiple languages, you need separate site verifications for each subdirectory or subdomain. I manage a site that targets the UK, Germany, and France. Google Search Console handles this with hreflang tags and a single property. Bing required three separate verifications, each with its own DNS record. The setup took 35 minutes. Every time I add a language variant, I know I will need to repeat that process.

Indexing speed is another gap. Bing's auto-discovery of new pages via sitemaps or internal links is slower than Google's by an order of magnitude. In a test I ran last year on a new blog, Google indexed the first three posts within 6 hours of publication. Bing took 13 days for the first post and never indexed the second until I manually submitted it through the URL Inspection tool. For news-heavy sites or businesses that publish frequently, that lag makes Bing Search Console feel like a secondary tool rather than a proactive one.

Finally, the tool lacks the kind of bulk action workflows that power users expect. You cannot select multiple URLs and request reindexing in one go. You cannot export a list of all indexed pages with their metadata. [Ahrefs](/ahrefs/), for example, lets me do both of those things from its 'Site Audit' feature. Bing's UI is built for small-scale troubleshooting, not for managing hundreds of pages. I still open it every week, but I never rely on it for anything larger than a single URL check or a sitemap resubmission.

If you can only use one tool for search performance data, I would pick Google Search Console every time. It is free, it covers the search engine that sends 80–95 percent of most sites' organic traffic, and its data is richer — more rows, more granular filters, better integration with the rest of Google's ecosystem. That said, I do not consider it a replacement for Bing Search Console because the crawl and index data are not interchangeable. Running both costs me nothing but an extra login, and the cross-referencing has caught problems that either tool alone would have missed.

When I need deeper technical crawl analysis that goes beyond what either search console offers, I turn to [Screaming Frog](/screaming-frog/). It crawls my entire site on demand, surfaces broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and redirect chains, and it works offline. I use it once a month on every client site. Bing Search Console cannot do any of that — it only shows what Bingbot encountered during its own crawl, which may be days or weeks old.

For competitive intelligence and keyword research, [Semrush](/semrush/) or Ahrefs are my go-to tools. They pull data from both Google and Bing, so I can compare how the same keyword performs across engines without logging into each search console separately. I have a mild preference for Ahrefs because its backlink analysis is more comprehensive, but both tools have a free tier or trial that is worth testing. The catch is cost: a decent Semrush plan runs about 120 GBP a month, whereas Bing Search Console is free. For a solo SEO on a tight budget, I would start with Google Search Console plus Bing, add Screaming Frog (free for the first 500 URLs), and only subscribe to a paid tool once I had a specific need that those three could not solve.

One alternative I specifically do not recommend is using only a rank tracker or SERP checker to monitor Bing positions without also using Bing Search Console. [Rank checkers](/rank-tracker/) show you where your page ranks, but they give you zero insight into why it ranks there — no crawl errors, no sitemap status, no blocked resources. I made that mistake early in my career and spent three months trying to optimise a page that Bing could not even reach. Bing Search Console would have shown me the problem in under five minutes.