Bing Webmaster Tools: The Index ChatGPT Actually Reads

If ChatGPT is taking your potential website traffic, the first place to check is Bing. ChatGPT’s search partners include Bing (OpenAI), and a site Bing never indexed gives ChatGPT almost nothing to find. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and this post walks you through the steps.

In the last post, how to check your ChatGPT citations in GA4, you found your ChatGPT traffic number in GA4. The promise at the end was a walkthrough of checking whether Bing has indexed your site and fixing it if it hasn’t. That’s this post, start to finish.

Why Bing, of All Things

Not too many owners think about Bing at all, and the AI tools their customers use do. Here’s how it works: when ChatGPT needs current information from the web, OpenAI’s documentation says it works with Bing, Shopify, and other search providers to retrieve results (OpenAI).

Microsoft’s Copilot answers draw on Bing’s index directly. So the index (a search engine’s stored copy of the web pages it knows about) that most St. Louis business owners have never once checked is quietly feeding the AI tools their customers are starting to ask. It’s one of several non-Google surfaces worth owning; besides Google: how local businesses get found maps the rest.

Three crawlers matter for ChatGPT specifically, and they each do different jobs (OpenAI):

• { crawler = a program, search engine, or AI company runs to visit and read web pages automatically }
• OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search results. Blocking it removes you from ChatGPT search answers.
• GPTBot collects content that may train future AI models. Blocking it is a values decision, and it only affects training use.
• ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a human asks ChatGPT to look at it. It is used for certain user actions and does not crawl the web automatically (OpenAI).

The one that matters for showing up is OAI-SearchBot. Publishers must not block OAI-SearchBot if they want their content included in ChatGPT’s summaries and snippets (OpenAI).

If you or your old web developer blocked “all AI bots” in a robots.txt file at some point, you may have opted out of being recommended without knowing it.

First, Check Whether Bing Knows You Exist

Two checks, two minutes, no account needed:

1. Go to bing.com and search site:yourwebsite.com (with your real domain, no spaces).
2. Count the results. Your homepage and main service pages should appear. Zero results means Bing has not indexed your site at all.

Then check your robots.txt:

1. In a browser, open yourwebsite.com/robots.txt.
2. Look for lines reading User-agent: OAI-SearchBot followed by Disallow: /, or a bare User-agent: * with Disallow: /.
3. If either appears, that file is turning crawlers away. Note that OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours after a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust (OpenAI).

Let’s imagine a hypothetical Ballwin dental practice ran the first check and found two pages indexed out of thirty. The site wasn’t penalized; nobody had ever told Bing the other pages existed.

Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools, Click by Click

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and click Sign in. Use a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. Pick one you own, and never a vendor’s login.
2. If your site is verified in Google Search Console already, choose Import and approve the connection. Your sites and sitemaps copy over, and you’re done in one step.
3. Otherwise click Add a site, enter your full address (including the https at the start), and pick a verification method. The DNS option is Bing’s recommended default; the meta-tag option means pasting one line into your site’s header if you have edit access.
4. Once verified, open Sitemaps in the left menu and click Submit sitemap. Enter yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. If you’re on WordPress with an SEO plugin, that address almost certainly already works; try it in your browser first.
5. Open URL Inspection in the left menu and paste your homepage address, then each main service page. It tells you per page whether Bing has it indexed and why not if it doesn’t.
6. Give it a few days, then open Search Performance to watch impressions and clicks from Bing itself.

While you’re in there, look at AI Performance. Bing added a report showing how your content appears across Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries (Bing). It’s the Bing-side cousin of the Google generative AI report from post one, and it’s free with the account you just made.

If you’re stuck at the verification step because you can’t get into your DNS or your site’s header, don’t worry. That’s the single most common place owners stall, usually because a past developer holds the keys, or their site was built on a third-party platform. Either way, email me at matthew@jamisonsoftwaresolutions.com and I’ll point you at the right fix.

Speed Up Future Updates with IndexNow

IndexNow lets your site tell Bing the moment a page changes instead of waiting to be recrawled. If your site runs on Wix, Duda, Shopify, or GoDaddy, the option to ‘IndexNow’ is already built in, and the WordPress plugins Yoast, Rank Math, and AIOSEO all support it (IndexNow).

For most owners this is a checkbox, and for WordPress it’s one plugin setting.

To set your expectations properly: IndexNow does not guarantee your pages will be crawled or indexed (IndexNow). It removes delay, and the indexing decision stays with the search engine.

The Fix List, Ranked by Effort Against Documented Impact

Everything above, ordered the way I’d do it for a client:

1. Submit your site + sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Directly addresses the mechanism: Bing relies on clear discovery and crawl signals to find, render, and index content (Bing). Without it, everything else would be an uphill battle.
2. Unblock OAI-SearchBot if it’s blocked. Documented as required for inclusion in ChatGPT summaries and snippets (OpenAI).
3. Fix noindex tags on pages you want found. Bing states NOINDEX keeps a URL out of Bing search, Copilot experiences, and grounding results (Bing). One stray tag can hide a service page from every surface at once.
4. Turn on IndexNow. Minutes on most platforms (IndexNow). Impact is speed of updates, and speed only matters after items one through three are done.
5. Put the answer at the top of each page. A study of 1.2 million AI answers and 18,012 verified citations found 44.2% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page’s content (Search Engine Land). Lead with the answer; elaborate after.

Notice what’s absent. The much-hyped llms.txt file is missing on purpose. Ahrefs, which sells SEO tooling, analyzed 137,000 domains and found that 97% of those files received zero requests in May 2026 (Ahrefs). No major AI provider honors it, and its remaining legitimate use is narrow agent and coding-tool readiness. Schema markup is also absent from the ranked list: it clarifies entities for machines and Bing’s own guidance covers structured signals, and no evidence shows it earns AI citations by itself. That doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful, it just means it’s not a core factor for showing up in ChatGPT.

What this does NOT tell you

• Bing indexing makes you findable, and findable is the whole claim. No step here guarantees ChatGPT will cite you, because retrieval is a precondition and the selection is the model’s.
• ChatGPT’s full index diet isn’t public. OpenAI names Bing and other providers as partners (OpenAI) and discloses no complete list.
• The impressions you’ll see in AI Performance measure being shown. They say a reader saw your content inside an answer. They don’t say if the reader acted on it.

Your Before-and-After Starts Now

You wrote down your GA4 number after post one. Today’s work is the “before” photo’s other half: whether Bing had you indexed at all. Recheck both in sixty days. Traffic from a near-zero base moves slowly, and slow is what real progress looks like.

Next in the series: the recommendation layer. When someone asks an assistant for “a good HVAC company near Ferguson,” the answer leans on business profiles and reviews, and that’s a different fix than indexing. The next post in this series covers it, including two review tactics that are commonly sold and actually against the rules.

If you want your Bing setup done with you instead of alone, email matthew@jamisonsoftwaresolutions.com. Two-week lead time; one-person shop; the account stays yours.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope this helps.