Nobody has ever said “let me Bing that.” The verb never happened. Microsoft spent two decades and an unknowable pile of money trying to make it happen, and it did not.
So for fifteen years the correct advice about Bing was to ignore it. Optimize for Google, let Bing pick up the crumbs, spend your Tuesday on something else.
That advice is now out of date, and not because Bing got good at being a search engine. It got useful at being plumbing.
Key takeaways
- Bing’s own published ranking parameters do not include social signals, exact-match keywords, or domain age. Three of the most repeated claims about Bing SEO are not in Microsoft’s documentation.
- Microsoft states plainly that Bing considers “semantic equivalents, including synonyms or abbreviations, which may not be exact matches of the query terms.” The exact-match advice is backwards.
- Claiming Bing Webmaster Tools takes about ten minutes and most South Carolina small businesses have never done it.
- Apple Business Connect is the Safari and Siri equivalent of a Google Business Profile. It is free. Almost nobody local has claimed it.
- The reason any of this matters is that AI assistants are grounded in search indexes, and the index they use is not always Google’s.
Why a search engine nobody uses started mattering
Ask ChatGPT, Copilot or Perplexity to recommend a contractor in Conway and you get a short list. Three names, maybe five. The assistant did not invent those names. It went and looked them up, read what it found, and summarized.
The looking-up part runs on an index. Google has one. Microsoft has one. OpenAI now runs crawlers of its own and publishes documentation for them, including a bot called OAI-SearchBot whose stated job is surfacing websites in ChatGPT’s search features.
Which index feeds which assistant has shifted more than once in the last two years, and anyone who tells you they have a current org chart of it is guessing. Here is the part that does not shift: if you are only indexed in one place, you are relying on one pipe. Getting into Bing’s index costs you ten minutes and nothing else. That is a bad trade to keep refusing.
Three things everyone says about Bing that Microsoft does not
This is the part worth reading twice, because the bad advice is everywhere and it has been copied into roughly nine thousand blog posts, most of them written in 2018 and quietly redated.
Microsoft publishes a page called How Bing delivers search results. It lists the main parameters Bing uses to rank: relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and language, and page load time. That is the list. Here is what is not on it.
“Bing rewards social shares as a direct ranking factor.” Not in the document. Not in any Microsoft documentation I can find. This claim has been circulating since roughly 2013 and it survives because it is pleasant to believe. Posting more on Facebook is easier than fixing your site. Microsoft does list user engagement, but it describes that as Bing’s own data: “Did users click through to search results for a given query, and if so, which results?” That is clicks on Bing, not likes on Facebook.
“Bing favors exact-match keywords, so stuff them in your titles.” Microsoft says the opposite. From the same page, on relevance: Bing “also considers semantic equivalents, including synonyms or abbreviations, which may not be exact matches of the query terms.” If you write your page titles for a 2012 algorithm you will sound like a robot to a search engine that stopped wanting that.
“Older domains automatically rank better on Bing.” Not mentioned. The nearest thing is a line about reputation: “A well-known news site is considered to have a higher reputation than a brand-new blog.” That is about whether anyone has heard of you, not when you registered the domain. You cannot age your way to a reputation and you cannot buy one in a drop auction.
One more, because it comes up every time. The claim that “a high bounce rate tells search engines your page is bad” is wrong for Google, which has said repeatedly that bounce rate is not a ranking signal. It is closer to true for Bing, which does list user engagement as a parameter. Two engines, two answers, and the internet blends them into one confident sentence that is half wrong.
What actually works
Having removed three things from your list, here is what goes on it.
Claim Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. This is the whole first step. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it imports directly from Google Search Console, so you are not starting from scratch. Most of the South Carolina businesses we audit have never opened Bing Webmaster Tools. Not because they decided against it. Because nobody told them it existed.
Fix page speed, because it is on the list. Microsoft names page load time as a ranking parameter outright. Google measures the same thing through Core Web Vitals. This is one of the rare cases where the two engines want the identical thing and you get paid twice for one piece of work. Our technical SEO work starts here for exactly that reason.
Be consistent everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, categories. Conflicting information is worse than missing information, because a machine that cannot confirm a fact will not repeat it. This is the single thing that holds back more local businesses than any other, and it is the cheapest to fix. See listings management.
Write pages that answer questions. Relevance and quality are two of the six parameters. A page that answers one question clearly beats a page that gestures at nine. This is also, not coincidentally, what gets you quoted by an AI assistant. See content marketing.
The Apple half that almost nobody does
Now the part that gets skipped entirely.
A large share of your customers are on iPhones. When they want a plumber, plenty of them never open a browser at all. They ask Siri, or they pull down on the home screen and use Spotlight, or they open Apple Maps. None of those is Google.
Apple runs a free tool called Apple Business Connect. It is what a Google Business Profile is, for Apple’s ecosystem: your hours, your photos, your categories, your pin on the map. It feeds Maps, Siri and Spotlight.
Almost no local business in South Carolina has claimed theirs. We check, on every audit. The hit rate is dismal, and it stays dismal because there is no Apple equivalent of the postcard Google mails you. Nothing prompts you. You simply have to know.
That is the entire opportunity. A free profile, in a channel your competitors have not heard of, serving the half of your market holding an iPhone.
What to do this week
- Claim Bing Webmaster Tools. Import from Google Search Console. Ten minutes.
- Claim Apple Business Connect. Hours, categories, photos, service area. Twenty minutes.
- Check your name, address and phone on the first page of results for your business name. Fix anything that disagrees.
- Open your site on an iPhone, off wifi. If it is slow or something is broken, that is a ranking parameter and a conversion problem at the same time.
- Ask ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours in your town. Write down who it names. That list is your real competitive set now, and it is often not the one you assumed.
If you want that last one scored properly, our AI Visibility Grader takes about three minutes and tells you which of the four pillars is holding you back. If you would rather we just look, the free Visibility Scorecard comes back in twenty four hours with no call attached.
Bing is still boring. Claim it anyway. Boring and free is a good combination when your competitors are busy posting to Facebook because a blog post from 2013 told them it would help their rankings.
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth optimizing for Bing if it has such a small market share?
The share figure depends entirely on who is counting and what they count, and the published numbers disagree with each other wildly. It is also the wrong question. Bing takes ten minutes to claim and costs nothing, and it feeds more than its own results page. A ten minute task does not need to clear a high bar.
Do I need a separate SEO strategy for Bing?
No, and anyone selling you one is selling you something. Microsoft’s published ranking parameters overlap heavily with Google’s priorities: relevance, quality, engagement, freshness, location, speed. Do the work once. Claim both tools. The divergence is much smaller than the blog posts suggest.
Does ChatGPT use Bing or Google?
The honest answer in 2026 is that it has changed more than once and is not fully public. OpenAI now documents its own crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT’s search features, and recommends allowing it in your robots.txt. The practical answer is to be indexed everywhere and to make sure nothing in your robots.txt is accidentally blocking an AI crawler. We check for that on every AI search audit.
What is Apple Business Connect and is it the same as Apple Maps?
Apple Business Connect is the free tool you use to manage how your business appears across Apple Maps, Siri and Spotlight search. Maps is where it shows up. Business Connect is where you control it.
My site works fine in Chrome. Why would it break in Safari?
Different browsers render code differently, and Safari is the strictest of the common ones. A form, a popup or a booking button can work perfectly on your laptop and fail silently on an iPhone. Since most of your local traffic is on a phone and a large share of those phones are iPhones, a Safari bug is not an edge case. It is most of your traffic.