Bing

Bing is Microsoft's web search engine, launched in 2009 as the successor to Live Search. It is the default search experience in Windows and the Edge browser, supplies part of the results shown by partners such as Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and since 2023 has been tightly integrated with generative AI answers under the Microsoft Copilot brand.

How Bing works

Pages are discovered and fetched by Bingbot, a crawler analogous to Googlebot, and ranked by algorithms weighing content relevance, site quality and authority, inbound links and user engagement signals. Bing Webmaster Tools — the counterpart of Google Search Console — lets site owners submit sitemaps, diagnose indexing issues and review search statistics. A distinctive piece of the ecosystem is IndexNow, a protocol co-created by Microsoft: instead of waiting for the crawler to return, a website instantly notifies the search engine about new or changed URLs, which can shorten indexing from days to minutes.

Practical applications

Optimizing for Bing overlaps heavily with standard SEO: sound site architecture, speed, valuable content and a natural link profile. Bing tends to be more literal about keyword matching and leans more on metadata, so precise titles and descriptions pay off; submitting a sitemap in Webmaster Tools and adopting IndexNow are quick wins. The ecosystem is completed by Microsoft Advertising, which places paid ads in Bing's SERPs — often at lower CPCs and reaching an older, more affluent demographic than Google Ads. Although Bing's global market share sits in the single digits, it is considerably higher on desktop and in English-speaking markets, making it a worthwhile traffic channel for many businesses, particularly in B2B.