Bing’s Growing Market Share: What It Means for Your SEO
Most people set up their SEO around Google and stop there. That made sense for a long time, and Google still dominates. But Bing's share of search has been creeping upward, particularly among desktop users and anyone who uses a Windows machine without changing the default browser. Before you dismiss it, it's worth understanding exactly where that growth is coming from, because the answer changes whether or not any of this should shift what you do.
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Where Bing’s Numbers Are Actually Coming From
The “Bing is growing” headline gets repeated a lot, but the data behind it is more specific than the summary suggests.
A big part of it comes down to Windows defaults and the Edge browser. Every new Windows machine ships with Edge as the default browser and Bing as the default search engine, and a meaningful share of users never change either. That is not Bing winning on merit against Google. It is Bing holding a captive audience that Microsoft has spent years carefully not losing. Older demographics lean heavily into this pattern, particularly users who set up a PC years ago and have no strong reason to swap.
Add Copilot into the picture and the dynamic shifts slightly. Microsoft has embedded AI-assisted search directly into the Windows taskbar, meaning users who ask Copilot a question are, under the hood, running a Bing query whether they know it or not. That integration is expanding Bing’s query volume in ways that traditional browser market-share reports undercount.
None of this makes Bing a strategic afterthought. These audiences are real, they search with intent, and in sectors like financial services, B2B software, and healthcare, the case for treating Bing traffic seriously is harder to dismiss than most people assume. The growth is not evenly spread across every niche, but where it is present, it is consistent enough to act on.
Google SEO and Bing SEO Are Not as Different as You Think
The assumption that ranking on Bing demands a completely separate workstream is mostly wrong. Clean technical structure, useful content, well-earned backlinks, good page speed, and clear site architecture all pull weight on both engines. If you have spent time getting those fundamentals right for Google, a large chunk of that work carries over. A site that loads fast, marks up its content clearly, and earns links from credible sources will perform better on Bing for the same reasons it performs better anywhere else.
The overlap is far bigger than most people building SEO strategies tend to account for, which means the cost of showing up on Bing is lower than it looks.
Where the real differences sit
Bing places noticeably more weight on exact-match anchor text. If your link profile leans heavily on branded or generic anchors, you may rank lower there even with solid overall authority. Domain age also carries more obvious influence in Bing’s ranking signals, which can feel frustrating for newer sites.
On the structured data side, Bing reads Schema markup and processes open graph metadata in ways that diverge slightly from how Google prioritises those signals. Testing your structured data in Bing Webmaster Tools separately is a sensible habit rather than an optional extra.
One strategy, tuned carefully, covers most of the ground on both.
What Bing AI Search Does to Organic Clicks
Copilot sits at the top of a growing share of Bing results pages, pulling a summarised answer directly from indexed content and presenting it before a user ever sees the blue links below. Your page can be the named source, your structured data can be the reason the answer exists at all, and the user still has no reason to click through. The value exchange that used to happen at the click now happens at the summary. It is not a theoretical risk. It is the same pattern that played out when Google rolled out featured snippets, and Bing is moving faster on it than most site owners have noticed.
The pages most exposed are the ones built around single, clean answers. Definition pages, FAQ sections, how-to guides with a clear numbered process. Anything a language model can restate in two sentences loses the click almost every time.
That does not mean pulling back on structured, well-organised content. It means being deliberate about what your pages contain beyond the quotable answer. Depth, context, proprietary data, a specific point of view, comparison tables, step-by-step detail that a summary cannot usefully compress. For anyone thinking through how AI-powered search affects organic traffic across both major engines, the pattern is consistent. Pages that give a reader a reason to stay are the ones that survive a world where the top of the results page increasingly answers the question before anyone clicks.
The Signals Bing Uses That Google Largely Ignores
Social signals and crawl hygiene
Social signals carry real weight on Bing in a way Google has never confirmed for its own algorithm. A page that picks up genuine shares and engagement on LinkedIn or Facebook tends to get a small but measurable lift in Bing’s results. If you are producing content and not distributing it properly, you are leaving ranking potential on the table.
Bing also indexes more slowly than Google, which means crawl hygiene matters more here. If your sitemap is messy, your internal links are broken, or you have a run of thin pages that waste crawl budget, Bing will not work around it the way Googlebot often does. It just will not get there.
What Bing Webmaster Tools shows you
Bing Webmaster Tools surfaces keyword-level click and impression data in a more readable format than Search Console manages in several respects, and it is far less used, so the keyword gaps you spot there tend to be fresh. Most site owners have not looked.
None of this demands a separate strategy. It does demand attention to the technical foundations you should already have in place.
Should You Optimise for Bing Separately?
For most sites, no. The overlap between solid Google SEO and Bing performance is large enough that you are already doing most of the right things.
Clean page structure, well-written content, a fast-loading site, proper title tags and meta descriptions, good internal linking, a healthy backlink profile. Every one of those moves the needle on both engines. Where people waste time is treating Bing as a completely separate discipline with its own content strategy, its own keyword research, and its own optimisation runs. That is almost always unnecessary overhead for a site that is already well-maintained on the Google side.
There are two cases where separate attention pays off. First, high-ticket B2B businesses where Bing’s desktop-heavy, older professional audience is bigger than Google’s for that sector. Second, any site that has never been submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools and has gaps in its index as a result. That second one takes twenty minutes to fix and is the most common oversight I see. Check Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, confirm your key pages are indexed, then get back to the work that benefits both engines at once.
The One Practical Step Most Sites Skip
Most sites that have had Google Search Console running for years have never been submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools. Not because the owner decided against it, but because it never came up. Setting up Bing’s organic search presence starts with a five-minute verification step. Skip it and Bing’s crawler is working blind on your site. It may index some pages eventually, but you get no data, no error reports, and no way to submit a sitemap. For a search engine that now powers Copilot, Microsoft Edge, and a growing slice of desktop and enterprise traffic, that is a surprisingly large blind spot to carry around.
The process is straightforward. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools, sign in with a Microsoft account, add your site, and verify ownership using an XML file, a meta tag, or by importing directly from Google Search Console. That last option takes about thirty seconds if you already have GSC set up.
Once verified, submit your sitemap. That single action tells Bing exactly what pages exist and how often they change. It does not guarantee rankings, but it removes the single biggest barrier between your content and Bing’s index. There is no good reason to leave it undone.