Integrations
The index nobody looks at, serving four places people search
Bing is the index behind DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and Copilot, and it reports what Search Console has no screen for.
One index, four front doors
Bing’s own share is the smallest part of what it decides. The same crawl and the same index answer DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and Copilot - so a site Bing cannot read is a site missing from four places at once, and three of them are not obviously Bing.
- Bingthe index itself
- DuckDuckGoweb results served from it
- Yahooweb results served from it
- CopilotMicrosoft's assistant, grounded in it
How many of your pages are actually in there
Bing reports the size of its own index for your site as a number, per day. Search Console has no equivalent - its coverage report tells you about categories of URL, not how many are held.
Which makes one comparison possible that was not before: the pages your crawl found, against the pages an index is actually holding. A gap between them is the whole question, and until now there was no number on either side of it.
250 pages found and not held. Whether that matters depends entirely on which 250 - and that is a question you can only ask once both numbers exist.
And what its crawler ran into getting them
Every day Bing reports what it fetched and what it was handed: pages crawled, 4xx, 5xx, requests refused by robots.txt, DNS failures.
On the first site connected, that read around 550 pages a day and roughly a hundred of them answering 404 - a fifth of the crawl, steady across five months rather than a spike. That is budget not spent on pages you want held, and it does not correct itself: a crawler keeps returning to URLs it has seen linked or listed in a sitemap.
- Fetched fine448
- 404 and other 4xx105
- 5xx9
20% of that day’s crawl spent on URLs that answered with an error. Real numbers from one connected site, named as an example rather than as a promise about yours.
A read-only key, and one step Bing does not make obvious
Bing authenticates third parties with an API key you generate yourself - there is no consent screen to click through. It is read-only, encrypted before storage, and never shown back to you.
The step that catches people: the API Access section has nothing to offer until a verified site exists on the account, and on the first visit the key sits behind a terms box. The connect screen carries the exact path with pictures, because the menu is not the hard part.
What connecting it adds
Pages in the index
A daily count of what Bing is holding, beside the count your own crawl found. The gap is the finding.
Crawl error share
What its crawler was handed while collecting them, as a share of what it fetched - a count alone reads as a catastrophe or as noise depending on the denominator.
Queries and pages, dated
Clicks, impressions and average position per query and per page, per day, with position weighted by the impressions it was measured over.
Verified or not, said plainly
An unverified site answers every call with nothing rather than an error, so we say which of those an empty panel is.
Questions
- It is not really about Bing's own search share. The same index answers DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and Copilot, so it decides whether you appear in four places at once. Measured on one of our own sites over 90 days, Bing and cn.bing.com sent 334 sessions against Google's 59.
- Two things. How many of your pages are in the index, as a number, rather than a coverage report you have to read. And what the crawler was handed while fetching them - 4xx, 5xx, robots blocks, DNS failures - which tells you how much of its crawl is being spent on URLs that answer with nothing.
- A read-only API key you generate in your own Bing Webmaster Tools account, under Settings, API access. It is encrypted before it is stored and never shown back to you. One key covers every site on your Bing account - Bing issues it per user, not per site.
- Add it and import the verification from Google Search Console - two clicks, and it carries the verification across without a DNS record. Until Bing has verified a site it reports nothing at all for it, which is different from reporting zero, so we say which of those you are looking at.
- Bing decides. It answered with about five months of daily traffic and crawl statistics on the sites we connected, and there is no way to ask for more or less - so the first sync is the whole history it will give you.
Start free
One site and 100 credits - up to 200 pages a scan, about 5 scans, and the whole report. No card. Paid plans add more sites, bigger crawls and the AI rewrites.