Bing
Submit URLs to Bing with IndexNow
Bing gives you four ways to tell it about a URL. Its own help page marks IndexNow as the recommended one and warns that the other submission APIs may be deprecated. Here is how they compare and how to set up IndexNow for Bing.
Protocol facts last checked 2026-09-24.
Four ways to get a URL in front of Bing
| Method | Reaches | Limits | Automation |
|---|---|---|---|
| IndexNow | Bing and every other participating engine | 10,000 URLs per request | Any script, CMS or CDN with a key file |
| Submit URLs in Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing only | 10,000 URLs per domain per day, reset at midnight UTC | None. You paste one URL per line. |
| URL Submission API | Bing only | Same daily quota, 500 URLs per batch | Your own code, with OAuth or a Webmaster Tools API key |
| Sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools | Bing only | Bing typically reads a sitemap about once a day | Runs by itself once submitted |
Bing also has a Content Submission API that accepts the page body along with the URL. It is meant for large publishing systems, and it also reaches Bing only.
The manual form is fine for a handful of URLs after a launch. Bing says itself that submitting the same URL again does not make indexing faster. For a site that changes every week, it turns into a chore that someone eventually stops doing.
Why Bing recommends IndexNow
Bing and Yandex launched IndexNow in 2021. One request tells Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep about a changed URL, because participating engines share submissions with each other. You prove ownership with a key file on your host, so you don't need a verified Webmaster Tools account or OAuth.
The other methods are tied to Bing. The URL Submission API needs a verified site and OAuth or an API key from Webmaster Tools. It has a daily quota, and Bing's documentation says it may be deprecated as IndexNow adoption grows.
Set up IndexNow for Bing
- Create a key with the key generator. It is 8 to 128 characters of letters, digits and dashes.
- Serve it as
https://your-site.com/<key>.txt, with the key as the only content. Run the key checker to confirm Bing can fetch it without a redirect. - Send a URL. The simplest form is a GET request:
https://www.bing.com/indexnow?url=https://your-site.com/pricing&key=<key>For up to 10,000 URLs at once, POST JSON with host, key, keyLocation and urlList. The IndexNow API reference has the full request. You can send it to www.bing.com/indexnow or to api.indexnow.org/indexnow. Both share the submission with the other engines.
If your site is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools, its IndexNow tab shows the submissions Bing received. Verification is optional for IndexNow itself, but that tab is the only place Bing shows what arrived.
What Bing answers
200 means Bing accepted the URLs. 202 means it received them and has not validated the key yet. 403 almost always means Bing could not read the key file or the key did not match. 422 means a URL does not belong to the host you named, and 429 means you are sending too often, usually the same unchanged URLs. The status code reference covers each one and what to do next.
Bing, Copilot and ChatGPT search
Microsoft documents that Copilot sends web search queries to the Bing search service and writes its answer from the results. OpenAI's help center says ChatGPT search queries Bing in Enterprise and Edu workspaces, and names Microsoft among its search providers for everyone else. If Bing hasn't recrawled a page since your last edit, those answers work from the old version.
Bing draws the line to IndexNow itself. Its announcement of the AI Performance report says IndexNow helps AI systems use the current version of a page. IndexNow does not decide what an assistant quotes. That report in Bing Webmaster Tools shows where Copilot cites your pages today. Sources checked 2026-09-25.
What IndexNow will not do for you
- It does not rank pages. Bing still decides whether to crawl a URL and whether to index it.
- It does not reach Google. Google does not participate in IndexNow, so keep your sitemap in Search Console.
- It does not replace a sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools. Keep both. The sitemap covers what you forget to submit.
Automate it
Manual submission gets forgotten. A CMS plugin covers posts but misses pages generated elsewhere, and a deploy script sends every URL whether it changed or not. AutoIndexNow reads your sitemaps on a schedule, renders each page, and submits only URLs whose content changed. Each submission keeps its response code, so a broken key file shows up as an alert and not as a silent 403. Plans start at $19 per month for one site checked every 24 hours.
A 200 or 202 from an IndexNow endpoint means the request was accepted, not that the URL is indexed. Google does not participate in IndexNow.