In April 2013 this blog set a challenge: use Bing, and only Bing, for thirty days, and see how it felt. The point wasn’t to knock Google. It was that too many people thought Google was the internet.
Thirteen years on, that post was still picking up searches until we rebuilt the site. So here’s the follow-up, and it’s a more interesting answer than we expected.
Short version: almost nobody clicks through from Bing, but Bing reads your website more than Google does. And in a world where AI assistants answer questions before anyone clicks anything, that second number is the one to pay attention to.
What we measured
We host and look after 200+ websites on servers we manage, all behind the same CDN. We took a full week of its logs, 18 to 24 September 2026, and counted two things for successful page requests:
- Who sent the visitor, from the referrer (and the
utm_sourcetag ChatGPT adds to its links). - Which crawlers came reading, from their user agents.
It’s our client mix, not the whole internet: lots of Scottish businesses, sport, local services and publishing. But it’s a real week of real traffic, not a survey.
Who sent the visitors
- Google: 17,460 visits
- Bing: 781
- DuckDuckGo: 243
- Yahoo: 199
- Ecosia: 29
- ChatGPT: about 150 at most (links and tagged clicks together)
- Copilot and Perplexity: a handful
Google still sends the overwhelming majority of search visitors, no surprise there. Bing on its own sends under 5% of what Google does. Add in the engines that lean on Bing’s results, like Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and it’s nearer 7%.
A caveat: plenty of visits arrive with no referrer at all (apps, privacy settings, links copied into messages), so every one of these numbers is an undercount. The proportions are what matter.
If you stopped there, you’d ignore Bing. Most people do. That’s the mistake.
Who came reading
Here are the crawler requests for pages over the same week:
- Bingbot: 32,191
- OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI’s search crawler for ChatGPT): 16,313
- Googlebot: 11,906
- PerplexityBot: 9,225
- ClaudeBot: 7,219
- Applebot: 5,883
- GPTBot (OpenAI’s training crawler): 3,453
- ChatGPT-User: 1,687
Bingbot fetched nearly three times as many pages as Googlebot. OpenAI’s search crawler alone out-read Google. Between them, the AI companies’ crawlers read more of our clients’ sites than Google did.
The one that stopped us was ChatGPT-User. That’s ChatGPT fetching a page live, because a person asked it something and it went to check. That happened 1,687 times in the week. The number of people who then clicked through from ChatGPT to the site was around 150.
So for every visit ChatGPT sent, it read a page on someone’s behalf about ten times. Your website is being used to answer questions, by people who never arrive. That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason to make sure what gets read is accurate, clear and obviously yours.
Why Bing matters more than its clicks suggest
Bing isn’t just bing.com. Its index sits behind a lot of other places people search:
- Microsoft Copilot, in Windows, Edge and Office, runs on Bing.
- Yahoo and DuckDuckGo draw heavily on Bing’s results.
- ChatGPT’s search has used Bing alongside OpenAI’s own crawler.
If Bing can’t find, crawl or understand your site, you’re not just missing a few hundred Bing visitors. You may be missing from the answers in several of the places people now ask questions, and you’d never see it in Google Search Console.
How to get found on Bing (and the AI tools that use it)
1. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
It’s free, and you can import your sites straight from Google Search Console in a couple of minutes. Submit your sitemap. It shows you crawl errors, indexing problems and the searches you appear for, most of which nobody ever looks at.
2. Use IndexNow
IndexNow lets your site tell Bing (and other engines that support it) the moment a page is added or changed, instead of waiting to be crawled. Google doesn’t use it, but Bing does. For a news site, a shop with changing stock or a busy blog, it’s one of the cheapest wins in search.
3. Don’t block the crawlers by accident
Security tools, firewalls and “block AI bots” settings can quietly shut out Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot along with the junk. Decide deliberately. Blocking GPTBot (training) is a reasonable choice for some businesses. Blocking OAI-SearchBot or Bingbot takes you out of the search and answer results.
4. Claim Bing Places for Business
If you’re a local business, this is the Bing equivalent of your Google Business Profile, and it feeds Microsoft’s maps and local results. You can import your Google profile to save retyping.
5. Make your site easy to understand
This is the same work that helps with Google, and it matters even more when an AI is summarising you:
- Say plainly what you do, where, and for whom, in the page title and the first lines of the page.
- Use structured data for your business, services, articles and people.
- Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere.
- Give every page one clean URL, with old ones redirected in a single hop.
6. Check what the AI tools actually say
Ask ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity about your business and your services, the way a customer would. If the answer is wrong, out of date or about a competitor, that tells you exactly which pages need work.
So, can you Bing it?
You can. You probably still won’t, and that’s fine. Google is where most of your visitors will come from for a while yet.
But Bing is reading your website more carefully than Google is, and a growing share of the internet’s answers are being built from what it finds. Half an hour in Bing Webmaster Tools is the best-value SEO job most businesses haven’t done.
If you’d like us to check how your site looks to Bing and the AI tools, that’s part of our SEO work, and we’ll set up the plumbing while we’re at it. Tell us about your site.
Got a problem like this? Good. We like those.
Tell us what you’re dealing with and we’ll tell you honestly what we’d do.
