How do Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow help with ChatGPT Search and AEO?

ChatGPT Search retrieval is Bing-powered. Microsoft Copilot is Bing-powered. Brave Search (which feeds Claude's web tool) cross-references Bing. That makes Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) the highest-leverage free AEO surface most brands ignore. Claiming and configuring BWT properly lifts ChatGPT Search citation rates 15–30% on Surfaced audits because it fixes indexability problems Google's index quietly tolerates.

The Bing-side AEO setup: (1) Claim your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and verify via DNS or meta tag. (2) Submit your XML sitemap to Bing — Bing's crawler is less aggressive than Google's, so manual submission accelerates inclusion. (3) Check the URL Inspection tool for any pages returning indexability errors specifically in Bing — pages indexed in Google but not Bing are invisible to ChatGPT Search. (4) Enable IndexNow — see below. (5) Monitor the "Search Performance" report for Bing query data, which is a better leading indicator of ChatGPT Search behavior than Google Search Console data.

IndexNow is a free open protocol (backed by Microsoft and Yandex, with Cloudflare integration) that lets your site push notifications of new or updated URLs directly to participating search indexes, including Bing. For AEO this matters because retrieval-side AI engines reflect Bing's index within hours via IndexNow vs. days via natural crawl. Implementation is a 30-minute lift: generate an API key, host it at a stable path on your domain, and POST changed URLs to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow. Cloudflare and Yoast offer one-click integrations. Sites using IndexNow see fresh-content citation share lift 2–4x faster than baseline.