Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Bing (and What IndexNow Can Do for You)

The Blind Spot

When most people think about SEO, they think about Google. That makes sense—Google handles roughly 90% of global search traffic. But that remaining slice? It’s not trivial.

Bing serves over 100 million daily active users. It holds about 8–10% of US search market share, and its reach is wider than you might expect. Bing powers the search results behind Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. If someone searches on any of those platforms, your Bing ranking is what determines whether they find you.

Microsoft reported $12.58 billion in search and news advertising revenue in fiscal year 2025. That’s not a hobby project. Real advertisers are spending real money reaching real customers on Bing.

And here’s the part most small businesses miss: because fewer people optimize for Bing, the competition is lighter. The same content that’s buried on page three of Google might sit on page one of Bing. Same content, different audience, less competition.

Who Actually Uses Bing?

More people than you’d think—and they tend to be a demographic that businesses want to reach.

Bing Webmaster Tools: The Free Dashboard You’re Not Using

If you’ve set up Google Search Console, you already understand the concept. Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s equivalent, and in some ways it’s more generous with the data it shares.

What you get for free:

The SEO audit feature alone is worth the setup. It catches things like pages with meta descriptions that are too short—exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that’s easy to fix but hard to spot on your own.

What Is IndexNow?

Here’s how search engines normally find your new content: they crawl. Bots visit your site on a schedule—maybe every few days, maybe every few weeks—and check for changes. If you published a blog post on Monday, Google might not discover it until Thursday. Bing might take longer.

IndexNow flips this model. Instead of waiting for search engines to come to you, you tell them the moment something changes. Published a new page? Send a ping. Updated an old one? Send a ping. Deleted something? Ping.

It’s an open protocol—not owned by any single company—and it’s supported by six search engines:

One API call. Six search engines notified. The protocol handles the distribution—you don’t need to contact each one separately.

The numbers speak for themselves: IndexNow processes over 3.5 billion URLs per day. Major platforms like LinkedIn, eBay, Etsy, GitHub, GoDaddy, Condé Nast, and the Internet Archive all use it. This isn’t experimental—it’s production infrastructure.

How IndexNow Works

The setup is surprisingly simple. Three steps, no account required, no approval process.

Step 1: Generate a Key

Your key is just a unique string—a UUID works fine. Something like:

a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890

Step 2: Host the Key File

Create a plain text file named {your-key}.txt containing just the key itself. Upload it to your site’s root directory so it’s accessible at:

https://yoursite.com/a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890.txt

This proves you own the site. It’s the same principle as Google’s site verification files.

Step 3: Submit URLs

For a single URL, it’s a GET request:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
  ?url=https://yoursite.com/new-blog-post
  &key=a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890

For multiple URLs (up to 10,000 at once), it’s a POST request with a JSON body:

{
  "host": "yoursite.com",
  "key": "a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890",
  "urlList": [
    "https://yoursite.com/new-post",
    "https://yoursite.com/updated-page",
    "https://yoursite.com/another-page"
  ]
}

That’s it. No OAuth tokens, no API keys to register, no rate limiting for normal use. A successful submission returns HTTP 200, and all six participating engines are notified.

What About Google?

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Google does not participate in IndexNow. As of early 2026, Google has acknowledged the protocol but hasn’t adopted it. Google relies on its own crawling infrastructure and Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool for manual submissions.

Does that make IndexNow pointless? Not at all. Here’s why:

The Practical Payoff

Here’s what a typical small business gains by spending 20 minutes on Bing + IndexNow:

The Bottom Line

Google dominates search. Nobody disputes that. But “Google dominates” doesn’t mean “nothing else matters.” Bing’s 100 million daily users are searching for the same things your Google visitors are—and most of your competitors aren’t optimizing for them.

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes ten minutes and gives you free SEO insights. Set up IndexNow. It takes another ten minutes and ensures every search engine (except Google) knows the moment you publish something new.

Twenty minutes of setup. Six search engines. Zero ongoing maintenance. That’s the kind of ROI every small business should jump on.