Bing Search Console: What Bing Webmaster Tools Shows, Report by Report

People who search for Bing Search Console want the Bing equivalent of Google's tool. It exists, under a different name, and a few of its numbers do not mean what the Google ones do.

There is no product called Bing Search Console. The Bing equivalent of Google Search Console is Bing Webmaster Tools, and it shows the same kinds of things: clicks, impressions, queries, pages, and how the search engine crawls and indexes your site. If you know Search Console, you can read Bing Webmaster Tools quickly with four adjustments: it counts more result types, it reports two position fields, it updates queries and pages weekly, and it gives you daily crawl data. Below is a report-by-report translation, with notes on what Quiriz reads from it.

Report by report

The structure is similar enough that a Search Console habit transfers. The value of reading Bing separately is mostly in the crawl reports, which often surface technical issues, and on sites where Bing's audience is a bigger share than average.

What the totals count

Bing's daily clicks and impressions include several result types. From March 24, 2023 they count web, chat, news, images, videos and knowledge panel; earlier days count web results only. That has two consequences. First, a series that crosses that date has a step in it that has nothing to do with your site. Start year-over-year comparisons after the date, or state the break. Second, a click from a chat answer and a click from a classic result sit in the same number. The data Quiriz reads does not give the split, so do not claim one.

Reading position

For queries and pages, Bing reports two averages: the average position of the impressions and the average position of the clicks. They differ because clicks tend to go to higher positions than the typical impression. For a single query over a week, use the impression position as the rank. When you combine rows, whether weeks or queries, the correct average weights each row by its impressions. Quiriz stores a helper column, position weighted by impressions, so the average for any period is the sum of that column divided by the sum of impressions. Averaging the position column directly overweights small queries.

Bing sends a negative value when it could not compute a position. That means no data. If your spreadsheet treats it as a number, your average position will be wrong in a way that is hard to see. Quiriz leaves such values empty.

Reading weekly rows

Bing dates each queries and pages row to a week, and updates them once a week, so the most recent week may not be there yet when you look. Two habits help. Compare whole weeks with whole weeks, and aggregate to months only from complete weeks. And remember that each row is a top-query row, not a complete list: a query that falls out of Bing's top list in a given week is missing from that week, which is different from having no impressions. If a query you care about vanishes for a week, check the daily totals before concluding anything.

Crawl numbers: levels and flows

Not every number in the crawl report behaves like a click count. Think of two groups:

• Flows are counted per day and can be added: pages crawled, crawl errors, pages blocked by robots.txt, and the counts of 2xx, 301, 302, 4xx and 5xx responses.
• Levels describe a state on a day: pages in the index and inbound links. Never add days together. Read the latest day and compare it with an earlier one.

A worked example, with made-up numbers: crawl errors rise from 12 per day to 140 per day for a week, 4xx responses rise with them, and pages in the index slips from 8,200 to 7,900. That pattern suggests a URL change broke links. Search performance would not show it for a couple of weeks. This is the argument for reading the crawl data every month.

What Quiriz reads

The Bing Webmaster Tools connector in Quiriz is in beta, read-only, refreshes daily, and is included in paid plans. You paste the API key from Bing's Settings, API access page, choose one verified site, and Quiriz reads [Bing] Daily performance, [Bing] Queries by week, [Bing] Pages by week and [Bing] Crawl stats by day. It keeps every day and week it has seen, for up to 25 months, because Bing returns only what it still holds.

The metrics are Bing clicks, Bing impressions, Bing CTR, Bing query clicks, Bing query impressions and Bing average position, defined once. Questions that map to the translation table above:

• How did our Bing clicks and impressions change each week this year?
• Which Bing search queries brought the most clicks last month?
• Which queries have many Bing impressions but few clicks?
• What is the latest number of pages in the Bing index, and how many 4xx responses did Bing see last month?

Using the same wording against the Google connector gives you comparable questions, each answered from its own source. See the Search Console dashboard post for the Google side.

Limits

• Queries and pages are weekly and limited to the top rows Bing returns, so they add up to less than the daily total.
• There is no split by result type, country or device in what the connector reads.
• History from before you connected is only what Bing still held at that point.
• Averages describe typical ranking, not a specific search.

For the decision of whether to run both tools and how to combine their numbers, see Google Search Console vs Bing Webmaster Tools.

Frequently asked questions