Bing Webmaster Tools: What It Reports and How to Build a Monthly Bing Report

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free site dashboard for Bing search. This post is not its manual; it is about getting the numbers out and into a report someone will read.

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free dashboard for how your site performs in Bing search. It reports clicks, impressions, average position, top queries and pages, how Bing crawls your site, and how many pages are indexed. To report on it, verify the site, read the search performance and crawl sections for the month, export the data or pull it through an API key, and keep Bing in its own section of your SEO report. This post covers what the tool shows, how to get numbers out of it, and a monthly report you can reuse. It is not a replacement for Microsoft's own documentation, which is the place for setup details.

What Bing Webmaster Tools is, in one paragraph

Site owners add a site, prove they control it, and Bing shows them how the site is doing in its results and how its crawler sees the site. Bing also offers an import from Google Search Console, so a site verified there can carry over. Beyond reporting, the tool lets you submit sitemaps and individual URLs, and Bing supports IndexNow, a protocol for telling participating search engines that a page changed. This post is about the reporting side.

What it reports

Four kinds of numbers matter for a regular report:

• Site totals per day: clicks and impressions, with CTR as clicks over impressions.
• Top queries: clicks, impressions and position per query. Bing returns its top queries only, so the list will not add up to the site total.
• Top pages: the same for page URLs.
• Crawl and index health: pages crawled, crawl errors, pages in the index, inbound links, pages blocked by robots.txt, and the split of responses by status (2xx, 301, 302, 4xx, 5xx).

The last group is the one people forget, and the one where the tool often earns its keep. A rise in 4xx or 5xx responses, or a sharp fall in pages in the index, is a technical issue you can fix before it shows up as a traffic drop. Two of those numbers, pages in the index and inbound links, are levels, not flows: report the latest value, never the sum of days.

Getting the data out

For a one-off report, export from the report on screen and paste it into your spreadsheet. For anything recurring, use the API: in Bing Webmaster Tools open Settings, then API access, and choose Generate Key. That key lets another tool read your verified sites' data.

One practical limit shapes how you do this. Bing's reporting methods take no date range from the caller and return whatever the service still holds. If you do not save the data, the history you can see is only what Bing keeps. The habit that fixes this is simple: store each pull. A report comparing this month with the same month last year needs last year's data to have been saved last year, or kept by a tool that saves it for you.

A monthly Bing report

Keep it short. For most sites Bing is a small share of search, so one page is enough:

1. Headline: clicks, impressions and CTR for the month against the previous month and last year, with one sentence on what changed.
2. Top queries and pages: the ten with the biggest movement, not the biggest total.
3. Crawl health: pages in the index (latest value), crawl errors, and any change in 4xx or 5xx responses.
4. One action: something specific, such as fix the 404s on the old URL pattern, or submit the new sitemap.

An example with made-up numbers: 2,400 Bing clicks in September against 2,150 in August, impressions of 96,000 against 91,000, and CTR of 2.5 percent against 2.4. A short paragraph under the table is worth more than another chart. The SEO report template has the full Google-side structure; Bing slots in as a section of it, as the comparison with Google Search Console explains.

How Quiriz reads Bing Webmaster Tools

Quiriz is an AI business analyst. The Bing Webmaster Tools connector is in beta, read-only, refreshes daily, and is included in paid plans. You paste the API key you generated, pick one verified site, and Quiriz reads four datasets:

• [Bing] Daily performance: clicks and impressions per day.
• [Bing] Queries by week and [Bing] Pages by week: clicks, impressions and position for the top queries and pages, one row per week as Bing dates it.
• [Bing] Crawl stats by day: crawled pages, crawl errors, pages in the index, inbound links, blocked by robots.txt, and counts of 2xx, 301, 302, 4xx and 5xx responses.

Because Bing returns only what it still holds, Quiriz stores every day and week it has seen, up to 25 months, so your history grows beyond what Bing shows. Metrics such as Bing clicks, Bing impressions, Bing CTR and Bing average position are defined once, with position weighted by impressions. Example questions: How did our Bing clicks and impressions change each week this year?, Which Bing search queries brought the most clicks last month? and Which pages get the most clicks from Bing? For the crawl section, ask for the latest number of pages in the index and the 4xx and 5xx counts over the last month.

Limits

• Top queries and pages only. Rows add up to less than the daily totals.
• Weekly, not daily, for queries and pages. Bing updates them once a week.
• A definition change in March 2023. From March 24, 2023, daily totals count all Bing result types; earlier days count web results only. Do not compare across that date without saying so.
• A missing position is not a rank. Bing sends a negative value when it could not compute one; Quiriz leaves it empty rather than treating it as a position.
• One site per connection, and a crawl column Bing does not send is left empty.

To see how Bing's numbers line up with Google's before reporting them side by side, read what Bing shows compared with Search Console.

Frequently asked questions