Analytics · October 7, 2026 · 8 min read
Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console
Three Bing Webmaster Tools reports have no Search Console equivalent — competitor backlinks, keyword volume, a site audit. Here is the division of labour between the two.
By FluxWriter
Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console overlap less than you would expect: two of Bing's reports have no Search Console equivalent at all, a third is one Google retired in 2024, and two more go further than the reports Google gives you. Most practitioners verify Bing once and never open it again, filing it under Bing's search share — a number that measures the clicks Bing sends and says nothing about what its crawler has learned about your site. This guide walks through the five reports worth opening, the thresholds that make each actionable, and where Search Console still wins.
Why Bing's Search Share Is the Wrong Test
The case against Bing Webmaster Tools is always a market-share number. Bing sits in the low single digits worldwide by most trackers and somewhere around 8–15% of US desktop searches, so the tool gets filed under "later". That's the wrong test.
Search share measures where the clicks come from. It says nothing about what a second, independent crawler can tell you about your own site — and Bing crawls your pages whether you look at the results or not.
The index also travels further than the search box. Yahoo and DuckDuckGo build their results on it. So does Copilot, and ChatGPT's search feature has drawn on it too. A page Bing has not crawled is invisible to all of them at once — which makes Bing's view of your site worth more than its share of the query market.
Getting the data in takes under 10 minutes. Bing Webmaster Tools imports every property you have already verified in Search Console in one step. Import first, then give it 7–14 days to populate.
What the Five Reports Actually Add
Not every screen in the tool earns a visit. Search Performance looks and behaves like its Search Console cousin, and Sitemaps shows the same discovered-versus-indexed count you already have. Skip those on the first pass.
Five reports are different in kind. Each one either has no Google equivalent or covers ground Google has since abandoned. Compare each against its nearest Search Console counterpart:
| Bing report | What it shows | Search Console equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Site Explorer | Every URL Bing has discovered, by folder, with index status, inbound link count and clicks | Page indexing report, with no folder view |
| Backlinks (Similar sites) | A competitor's referring domains and anchor text beside your own | Links report, your site only |
| Keyword Research | Bing query volume, trend and related questions by country | ❌ None |
| Crawl Control | Crawl rate by hour of day | ❌ Retired in early 2024 |
| Site Scan | On-demand crawl audit graded by severity | ❌ None |
The third column is the argument. Two of the five have no Google counterpart at all, a third existed until Google removed it, and the other two show you more than the report Google leaves you with.
Site Explorer: Every URL Bing Knows About
Site Explorer is the report to open first, because it shows which parts of the site the engine actually knows about — something Search Console makes you reverse-engineer. It presents your URLs as a folder tree, and each folder carries its own indexed count, inbound links and clicks.
Read it top-down. Expand the folders that hold your money pages and compare the URLs Bing has discovered against the number you publish there. A folder where fewer than 70% of the pages you care about show as indexed is worth a ticket — on Bing, and probably on Google too, since both crawlers trip over the same architecture. Google may simply be hiding the same problem behind a report with no folder view.
The filters do the diagnostic work. Site Explorer filters to crawl errors or robots.txt blocks, and separately to pages discovered but never indexed. Every row carries a last-crawl date. A cluster of important pages with no crawl in 60+ days is a depth or internal-linking failure — not a Bing quirk.
Sort by inbound links inside a folder. Pages showing zero are orphan pages in Bing's eyes, and an orphan is recrawled slowly, if at all. Link to them from something that already ranks.
The Backlink Report Google Never Built
Search Console's Links report has always stopped at your own property. The Bing Backlinks report goes one step further — a Similar sites tab where you enter a competitor's domain and see its referring domains, anchor text and target pages next to yours.
That is competitor link data at a price of zero. It will not match the depth of Ahrefs or Semrush, where a mid-sized profile runs to tens of thousands of rows, and a new link can take weeks to show up rather than days. For a site with 500 to 5,000 referring domains it is usually enough to answer the first question — whether this competitor is worth studying at all.
Use it as the free first pass. Run each rival through the tab before paying for a link tool, and reserve the paid subscription for the one or two whose profiles look worth copying. A full backlink gap analysis, with exports and a prospect list, is a separate job with its own workflow. This report tells you whether that job is worth starting.
The anchor text column is the part worth reading slowly. If a large share of a competitor's anchors are exact-match commercial terms, treat that profile with suspicion rather than as a model to copy. If yours shows the same pattern, fix that before you build anything new.
Keyword Research With Real Volumes
Google has never put a keyword volume in Search Console. Bing's Keyword Research tool does, with a trend chart and a country filter. The related-questions list underneath feeds FAQ sections directly.
The numbers are Bing's own, so scale them. A rough rule of thumb in English-speaking markets is that Google volume runs 5–15x the Bing figure, and the ratio swings hard by topic — technical and enterprise queries skew toward Bing because Edge ships with it as the default and plenty of corporate desktops never change it. Treat the figures as relative, not absolute.
Where the tool earns its place is validation. A term you had planned a post around that shows 0 on Bing deserves a spelling check, then a demand check. A related question holding a steady 200 a month that you had not considered is a section heading — sometimes a post of its own.
Crawl Control and the Site Scan
Google removed the crawl-rate limiter from Search Console in early 2024. Bing kept its version. Crawl Control sets how hard Bing's crawler may hit the site for each hour of the day, and you can push the load toward your quiet hours.
Most sites should leave it alone.
Use it when server logs show Bingbot taking more than 15–20% of crawl requests during peak hours on a site that is already slow. Throttling a small, fast site gains nothing — it only delays fresh content.
Site Scan is the more broadly useful of the two. It is an on-demand crawler that audits a capped number of pages and grades each issue High, Medium or Low — missing titles, duplicate descriptions, thin pages, broken links. It will not replace Screaming Frog or Sitebulb on a 50,000-URL site, but it costs nothing and takes 10 minutes to start.
Run it monthly. Clear every High-severity item within 30 days, and track the Medium count as a trend rather than a to-do list.
Where Search Console Still Wins
Two limits are worth stating before you rebalance your time. Bing's search performance history runs 6 months against Google's 16, so any year-over-year analysis still lives in Search Console. And Bing's index of most sites is thinner — as a rough illustration, a site with 2,000 pages indexed on Google often shows 1,200–1,600 on Bing, and that gap is not always a fault you can fix.
The reporting is also lighter on the front end. There is no Core Web Vitals report, and rich-result coverage is not broken out by type the way Google does it. Structured data shows up in URL Inspection, but you check one page at a time.
Use Bing for what Google withholds, and Google for depth. That is the whole division of labour.
FAQ
Do I need Bing Webmaster Tools if Bing sends me almost no traffic?
Yes, because the traffic is not the point. Site Explorer and Site Scan are diagnostics about your site, and they work regardless of how many clicks arrive. A site earning 20 Bing clicks a month still gets a second full crawl and a free audit, plus a look at competitor links it would otherwise pay for.
Is Bing keyword volume any use for Google rankings?
Only as a relative signal. The absolute numbers are Bing's, and Google demand usually runs several times higher, with the ratio changing by topic. Use the tool to rank candidate terms against each other and to surface related questions, then confirm priority with your own Search Console impressions before committing a post.
Will submitting URLs through IndexNow get me indexed on Google?
No. IndexNow is supported by Bing, Yandex and a handful of other engines, and Google has not adopted it as of this writing. Submissions still matter — a new post can appear in Bing within hours instead of days, and that index feeds several assistants — but Google discovers your pages through sitemaps and links.
The Practical Takeaway
Import your Search Console properties into Bing Webmaster Tools today and let the reports fill for 14 days. Then open Site Explorer, flag any money-page folder where fewer than 70% of published URLs show as indexed, and check the last crawl date on the pages that matter. Put your two closest competitors through the Similar sites tab and read their anchor text before deciding whether either profile is worth paying a link tool to dig into. Run Site Scan once, clear the High-severity items within 30 days, and repeat on the first of every month. Start with the one folder that earns you the most.
When FluxWriter publishes to a site that has an IndexNow key, it sends the ping as the post goes live, which makes Site Explorer the place to confirm what Bing then did with the URL.