Most small businesses have spent years ignoring Bing, and that was a reasonable choice when it was the search engine people only used by accident. Microsoft Copilot changes the maths. Copilot is built into Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365 and the Copilot app, and when it answers questions about the world it searches Bing. If Bing does not know your business well, Copilot is unlikely to either.
The good news is that learning how to show up in Microsoft Copilot is mostly a job of setting up a few free Microsoft tools that most of your competitors have never touched.
Where Copilot gets its answers
Microsoft describes Copilot’s web answers as grounded in Bing: when a question needs current information, Copilot runs Bing searches, reads the results and writes an answer with links to the sources. For local questions such as “plasterer near Swindon” or “Italian restaurant in Harrogate with outdoor seating”, it can also draw on Bing’s map and business listing data.
When Copilot answers without searching, it relies on what its underlying model learned in training, which may be out of date or missing small businesses entirely. You cannot do much about training data. You can do a great deal about Bing.
Bing’s index is also licensed to other services. Several search engines and assistants have used Bing results in the past, and OpenAI has said ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers alongside its own crawler. The exact arrangements change and are not always published, so treat that as a bonus rather than a promise: being well indexed in Bing may help you in more places than Copilot.
Step one: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s free equivalent of Google Search Console. It tells you which of your pages Bing has indexed, which it cannot read, and what searches you appear for. If you already use Google Search Console, you can sign in and import your verified sites from it in a couple of clicks.
- Sign in at Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft account (or import from Google Search Console).
- Add and verify your website.
- Submit your sitemap, usually found at yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml.
- Check the indexing reports for pages Bing has found but not indexed, and fix anything blocked by mistake.
- Use the URL inspection tool on your home page and main service pages to confirm Bing can read them.
Step two: turn on IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol, supported by Bing and some other search engines, that lets your website tell search engines the moment a page is added or changed. Instead of waiting for Bing to notice that you have updated your prices or added a new service, your site pings it straight away.
Some website platforms and plugins support IndexNow out of the box, and some hosting and security services can switch it on for you. If your site is custom built, it is a small job for whoever maintains it. For a business whose pages rarely change it is a nice-to-have; for one that updates menus, stock, prices or availability often, it is worth doing.
Step three: claim Bing Places for Business
Bing Places for Business is Microsoft’s free business listing, the Bing version of a Google Business Profile. It feeds Bing Maps and Bing’s local results, and it is one of the sources Copilot can use for local answers. If you already have a verified Google Business Profile, Bing Places lets you import it, which saves retyping everything.
| Field | What to check |
|---|---|
| Business name | Exactly as it appears on your signage and website, with no keywords added |
| Address or service area | Hide your address if you work from home and visit customers; list the areas you cover |
| Categories | Bing’s category names sometimes differ from Google’s, so choose the closest real match |
| Phone number | The same number as on your website and other listings |
| Website | Your real website, not a social media page |
| Opening hours | Current, including any seasonal changes |
| Photos and description | Real photos and a plain description of what you do and where |
Step four: give Copilot pages it can quote
Once Bing can find you, the pages themselves decide whether you are useful to cite. Copilot, like other assistants, builds answers from sentences it can lift and check. The businesses that get mentioned tend to have pages that state the basics without making the reader dig.
- The first lines of each main page say what you do, where you do it and who it is for.
- Each main service or product has its own page, so a specific question lands on a specific answer.
- Prices, or at least typical ranges and what affects them, are written in text rather than hidden behind “call for a quote”.
- Opening hours, areas covered, accreditations and turnaround times are written out plainly.
- Headings read like the questions customers actually ask.
- Your name, phone number and address or area match what is on Bing Places and elsewhere.
Common reasons a business is invisible in Bing
Bing Webmaster Tools will surface most of the technical ones for you. The consistency problems you find by searching your own business name in Bing and reading what comes back.
- Bingbot is blocked in robots.txt, often by an old rule nobody remembers adding.
- A security or bot-blocking setting at the host or CDN is refusing Microsoft’s crawler.
- The site is new and has never been submitted, and it has few links from elsewhere for Bing to discover it through.
- Key content only appears after scripts run or someone clicks, so the crawler sees an almost empty page.
- Duplicate or near-identical pages (one per village, say) make Bing unsure which page to show.
- The business details on Bing Places, the website and directories disagree with each other.
How to tell if it is working
Ask Copilot the questions your customers would ask, in their words, with your town in them. Note whether you are mentioned and which sources are linked. Do it every month or two rather than once, because answers vary. Bing Webmaster Tools shows your Bing search performance, and Microsoft has been adding reporting on appearances in AI answers; what is available depends on when you look, so check the current dashboard rather than relying on any guide, this one included.
In your website analytics, visits from Copilot may appear as referrals from copilot.microsoft.com or bing.com, depending on where the person clicked. Numbers for a small local business will be modest. What you are looking for is that the line is there at all.
If you would rather not do the setup yourself, every Nerdsharks site launches with Search Console set up, a sitemap in place and search and AI crawlers allowed, Bing's included. But everything above is free and can be done in an afternoon by anyone who can log in to their website.