A Johannesburg industrial supplier waved us off when we mentioned Bing. Nobody uses it, he said, everyone is on Google. Then his sales team started noting that new enquiries kept mentioning they had “found us through Copilot”. We verified his site in Bing Webmaster Tools and the report showed steady monthly impressions from desktop and AI surfaces he had never once looked at. He had been invisible on a channel that was already sending him business.
Bing is the search engine most South African businesses dismiss and few competitors bother with, which is exactly why it is worth a look. It is free, it takes an afternoon to set up, and it now feeds the AI tools your customers are starting to ask for recommendations. This post covers what Bing Webmaster Tools does, whether Bing still matters here, how it ties into AI search, and how we manage it.
What is Bing Webmaster Tools and what does it do?
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free counterpart to Google Search Console. It reports your impressions, clicks and average positions in Bing, flags crawl and indexing errors, lets you submit pages instantly through IndexNow, and includes keyword research and backlink data at no cost.
If you already know Search Console, the layout will feel familiar, because the two tools do the same job for different engines. You get a search performance report, a URL inspection tool to check how Bing sees any page, sitemap submission, and a site scan that surfaces technical problems. There is one feature that makes setup almost effortless: Bing lets you import your already-verified site straight from Google Search Console, so you are up and running in minutes rather than starting from scratch.
Does Bing still matter for South African businesses?
Yes, and more than its headline share suggests. StatCounter figures usually put Bing in the low single digits of the South African search market, but that number hides where it concentrates and what it now powers. Corporate and government machines across South Africa ship with Microsoft Edge and default to Bing, and Bing sits behind Copilot and a large part of ChatGPT’s web search.
For a business-to-business supplier, that concentration changes the maths. If a meaningful slice of your buyers sit at corporate desktops running Edge, the small national percentage understates how many of your actual prospects use Bing during the workday. These tend to be high-intent, desktop, in-hours searches, the kind that turn into quotes. The industrial supplier above is the pattern, not the exception. The consumer numbers are modest; the B2B and AI-referral numbers are the reason to pay attention.
How Bing Webmaster Tools supports AI search visibility
Because Bing’s index sits behind Copilot and much of ChatGPT’s web search, getting your pages into Bing is part of getting named by AI assistants. Submitting your URLs through IndexNow pushes them into the data layer those tools draw from, which makes it one of the lowest-effort wins in generative engine optimisation.
This is the part most SA businesses miss entirely. When someone asks ChatGPT or Copilot for “the best commercial electrician in Pretoria”, the tool runs a live web search, and that search leans heavily on Bing’s index. A business that has never submitted its pages to Bing starts that race a step behind, no matter how well it ranks on Google. Verifying in Bing Webmaster Tools and enabling the IndexNow protocol means new and updated pages reach that index fast. It works best as part of a wider plan, so it is worth reading how to fix a website that is invisible to AI search and how to build a generative engine optimisation plan alongside your Bing setup.
Which South African businesses get the most from Bing?
The businesses that gain most from Bing are the ones selling to other businesses, to corporates and to government, because those buyers sit at Edge-defaulted desktops through the working day. For them, Bing’s small national share badly understates its reach into the exact people who sign off on purchases.
In practical terms that means industrial and manufacturing suppliers, professional services like legal, accounting and engineering firms chasing corporate clients, companies bidding for government and enterprise tenders, and financial services teams in hubs like Sandton. If your buyers are at their desks inside large organisations, a share of them are on Bing whether they realise it or not. Consumer and retail brands get less direct traffic from Bing today, but the AI-referral angle applies to everyone: as more South Africans ask Copilot and ChatGPT for recommendations, being in Bing’s index is how you stay in the running for those answers regardless of sector.
How GKnect Digital sets up and monitors Bing Webmaster Tools
GKnect Digital verifies your site in Bing, imports your settings straight from Search Console, submits your sitemaps and switches on IndexNow, then monitors Bing crawl errors alongside Google so nothing is optimised for one engine and quietly broken on the other. It is a small, repeatable job that most agencies skip and most competitors ignore.
The setup itself is quick, but the monitoring is where the value sits. We check that Bing can crawl and index the pages that matter, watch for errors that only show up on Bing, and keep IndexNow feeding new content into the index that AI tools rely on. Because we run both consoles together, we catch the cases where a page ranks on Google but throws an error on Bing, or where a fix for one engine needs mirroring on the other. For most clients this rides along with their broader search work, so you can simply add Bing to your search visibility strategy rather than treat it as a separate project, and pair Bing data with Google Search Console for a full picture across both engines.
Setting Bing up this week
The fastest route is to open Bing Webmaster Tools, sign in, and use the import option to pull your verified site across from Google Search Console. From there, confirm your sitemap is submitted and turn on IndexNow so future changes reach Bing without waiting for a crawl.
After that it is a light monthly habit: check the search performance report for the queries Bing is showing you, and scan for any crawl errors unique to Bing. Given how few of your competitors have bothered, even a well-maintained basic setup puts you ahead on this channel.
What this means for you
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools by importing it from Google Search Console, which takes minutes.
- Submit your sitemap and enable IndexNow so new pages reach Bing and the AI tools it feeds.
- Treat Bing as a B2B and AI-referral channel, not a consumer one, when you judge its worth.
- Watch for crawl errors that appear on Bing but not Google, and fix them across both.
- Check the search performance report monthly for queries you are winning on Bing.
Where GKnect Comes In
GKnect Digital sets up and monitors Bing Webmaster Tools for South African businesses that want the desktop and AI-referral traffic their competitors are leaving on the table. We verify, submit, switch on IndexNow, and watch both search engines together, so your pages are visible wherever your customers, and their AI assistants, are looking.
