Check the number before you spend anything
Google is 86.1% of US search and Bing is 8.92% on Statcounter's August 2026 figures, counting every device. On US desktop it's Google 81.99% and Bing 12.82%, which is the surface that matters if you sell to people sitting at their desks. Statcounter builds these from pageviews on its own tracker network, so quote it as an estimate with a date attached, never as a census.
DuckDuckGo is the one honest addition, and it's smaller than the pitch. DuckDuckGo's own help page says it largely sources its traditional links and images from Bing, and DuckDuckGo is 1.7% of US search on all devices and 1.42% on desktop. That puts Bing's real reach at roughly 10.6% of US search, or about 14.2% on desktop. It's an addition, not a multiplier, and anyone stacking Yahoo's 2.74% on top of that is inflating the number, because Statcounter already counts Yahoo as its own engine.
Worldwide the answer changes: Bing is 4.5% against Google's 91.1%, on the same source. If your customers are mobile-first or outside the US, still do the setup below, because it's twenty minutes and it's free. Then spend nothing further on Bing at any level, because none of these numbers pays for a second content program.
Add the site by importing it from Search Console
Sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools and click Add a site. Microsoft's own documentation says you can sign up using any Microsoft, Google or Facebook ID, so there's probably no new account to create. The screen you land on is headed Select one of the methods to add your site. Nothing in this guide costs money at any step.
Take the import path, not the manual one. The card headed Already verified on Google Search Console? offers Import from Search Console, and its own selling points are No site verification required and Import sitemaps instantly. Bing pulls the list of sites you've already verified with Google plus their sitemaps, and you pick which ones to add. It does not import any of your Search Console analytics.
Read the permission before you grant it. Bing asks you to sign in to Google Search Console with View-Only permission and says it will use that access to periodically validate your verification status and update sitemaps, which means it stays connected rather than reading once and leaving. On your own site that's a fair trade. On a client's Search Console, get their yes first, because you're attaching a third party to an account they own.
If the import fails, verify with the meta tag
Bing's own failure message tells you the next move. When it can't reach Google it says it was not able to fetch data from your Google Search Console account, then offers the manual route. Choose Add your site manually and you land on Choose one of the verification methods, which lists HTML Meta Tag, XML File, Add CNAME record to DNS and DNS auto verification. Any one of them is enough on its own. It's a menu, not a checklist.
Take HTML Meta Tag on any site you can edit. Bing's instruction is to add the tag to your site's default or home page, and its error message checks that the tag sits inside the head section and before the closing tag, so that is exactly where it goes. Then leave it there permanently: the note under the field reads, don't remove the meta tag even after verification succeeds. If you can't edit the page, XML File puts a file at your web root instead.
Don't sit on DNS verification. If the automatic route doesn't confirm right away, Bing tells you it has not received instant confirmation from your DNS provider and that the check may take hours. Switch to the meta tag and finish today rather than watching a pending screen. Verification is the gate on everything below it, so getting past it by any method is the only thing that matters here.
Submit the sitemap, then leave it for two days
Open Sitemaps, click Submit sitemap, and paste the full URL. The field's own example is https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, and the accepted formats printed under it are XML, RSS 2.0, mRSS (Media RSS), Atom 0.3 & 1.0 and text files. If you came in through the Search Console import, your sitemaps arrived with you and this step is already done.
Then stop refreshing it. A new account is told its data and reports are being processed and that it may take up to 48 hours to reflect, and nothing you click shortens that window. Put a reminder two days out and go do the next step, which is the one that does the real work.
Turn on IndexNow, the step that actually pays
On Cloudflare this is a single toggle, and it's the highest-value thing on this page. In the Cloudflare dashboard, open your site's Caching section, go to the Configuration page, and enable Crawler Hints. Cloudflare's documentation confirms Crawler Hints supports IndexNow and lists it as available on Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Bing's own IndexNow card says it back: Cloudflare users, simply turn on Crawler Hints and your site will start submitting to IndexNow.
Two things switch it off silently. Cloudflare decides content changed from a cache MISS, so a hostname that isn't proxied through Cloudflare emits nothing at all, and Cloudflare won't report any asset whose response status is above 4xx. If the toggle is on and Bing shows no IndexNow activity, check the proxy status of that hostname before you check anything else.
Not on Cloudflare? Implement the protocol directly. The IndexNow documentation wants a key of 8 to 128 hexadecimal characters. The spec also spells out the allowed set as lowercase a-z, uppercase A-Z, numbers and dashes, so generate a hex string and don't hand-write one. Publish it as a UTF-8 text file named for the key itself at your site root and containing that key. Then it's a GET for one URL, or a POST with a JSON body carrying up to 10,000 URLs per post. 403 means the key isn't valid: either the key file isn't being served, or it is being served and doesn't contain that key. 422 means the URLs don't belong to the host, or the key doesn't match the schema. 429 means back off.
One submission reaches every participating engine, and Google is not one of them. IndexNow's published participant list is Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and AmazonBot, and the protocol commits those engines to share submitted URLs with each other. Anyone selling you IndexNow as a way into Google faster is selling something it does not do.
Use Submit URLs only when something is urgent
URL Submission is for a page you need crawled today, not for feeding Bing your site. Paste one URL per line, and the tool caps you: You can submit at most 500 URLs at a time. Your daily allowance is per site and displayed live on the page as Quota left for today (URL Submission Only). Read the number there. Bing templates it rather than publishing a figure, so any fixed daily quota you've seen in a blog post is somebody's guess.
The rejection that catches people is a host mismatch. Bing answers, URL is not related to your verified domain. Please verify URL before submitting. Your bare domain and your www version are separate properties here, and so are http and https. Verify the exact host your pages serve from, check what your sitemap actually lists, and if you serve on both, verify both.
Doing this across several sites? Get a key instead of clicking. Click Settings at the top right, open API Access, accept the terms, then click Generate API Key. Microsoft issues one key per user rather than per site, so the same key covers every property you've verified, and it tells you not to hand that key to anyone you don't trust.
Read AI Performance monthly, and buy nothing else
AI Performance is the report worth opening. Bing ships an AI Search Queries Report and an AI Pages view, and its Citations metric is defined in the tool as total citations from your site that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers for the selected date range. Read it monthly, don't tune for it, because there's no control anywhere in the tool that moves that number. What moves it sits on the page, which is its own free guide.
If pages stay out of the index, the sitemap coverage report sorts your problem into one of two kinds. Disallowed in robots.txt, No-index tag, Canonical URL exists, Redirect URLs, Dead links (404 - 410) and Cannot crawl the content (403, 5xx) are things you go and fix today. Discovered but not in index and Crawled but not in index are not: Bing's only advice for those is to consult its Webmaster Guidelines and improve the content quality. Resubmitting a page in either of those two buckets changes nothing, because the page is being judged rather than blocked.
Now stop, because you're finished. Nothing Microsoft publishes asks for Bing-specific content, Bing-specific keywords or Bing-specific markup, and its own remedy for an unindexed page points straight back at general page quality. Every step above is one-time work, so a monthly line item called Bing SEO is billing you for a report you can open yourself in ten seconds. If the pages need to be better, that's just SEO, and it counts on both engines at once.