Bing Webmaster

Bing search performance, crawl health, and backlinks

Bing Webmaster Tools — Setup Required

Bing's API gives you data Google Search Console hides — backlinks, query-level performance, crawl issues. Free, takes ~10 minutes to wire up.

  1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft account
  2. Click Add a site → Import sites from Google Search Console. Auth with Google (uses existing GSC verification — fastest path).
  3. Select all 4 macalister sites (hub, weddings, family, pets) and import.
  4. Once imported, go to Settings → API access, generate a key.
  5. Add to Vercel: BING_WEBMASTER_API_KEY (production only).
  6. Within 24h of next Thursday 7am UTC the dashboard will populate with query stats, crawl data, and backlinks.

Why Bing: ~3-5% of NZ search traffic, but Bing also powers DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT search, and Microsoft Copilot. Worth being indexed.