The other index, and why it is worth twenty minutes

Why bother

It is twenty minutes of setup and it covers an index used by more than one destination.

Several assistants and smaller engines draw on Bing rather than building their own index, so a page it does not know about is missing from more places than Bing.

The reports also differ from Google's, and a second opinion on a crawl problem is genuinely useful.

The second opinion is the underrated part. When one engine cannot fetch something and the other can, the difference usually points straight at the cause.

The second opinion is the underrated part. When one engine cannot fetch something and the other can, the difference usually points straight at the cause.

There is also a reporting difference worth having. The two engines disagree about which pages are worth storing more often than people expect, and a page one holds and the other drops is a useful signal about that page.

Setting it up

Verify the site, submit the sitemap, and you are done. Verification can often be imported from Search Console, which takes about a minute.

The interface is close enough to the one you already know that nothing needs learning.

As with the other tool, data collects from the day you verify and does not backfill.

Verification can often be imported from the other tool, which makes the whole setup about a minute of work.

Do it on the same afternoon you set up the other one. Both collect from the day of verification and neither backfills, so the cost of waiting is data you can never recover.

Direct notification

Bing supports a scheme where your site notifies the engine the moment a page changes, rather than waiting to be crawled.

Submissions are usually reflected quickly, which is a genuine difference from waiting on a crawl schedule.

One submission also reaches other engines that participate, so the coverage is wider than Bing alone.

One submission also reaches other participating engines, which is covered in IndexNow.

What the reports show

Which pages are indexed, which searches showed them, crawl errors, and markup problems.

It also reports backlinks it knows about, which Google's tool covers less usefully.

The keyword data is thinner than Google's simply because the volumes are smaller, and it is still real.

It also offers a crawl control schedule, letting you tell the engine when your server is busiest. That is a genuinely useful setting for a small site on modest hosting.

• Which pages are indexed
• Which searches showed them
• Crawl errors and what the server returned
• Markup problems
• Backlinks it knows about
• A crawl control schedule, so you can protect a busy server

Where it differs

Bing has historically been more responsive to direct submission and more literal about markup instructions.

The two engines also disagree about which pages are worth storing more often than people expect, which is informative.

Where both report the same problem, it is definitely a problem with your site rather than a quirk.

Bing has also been more open about how it uses markup and structured data, and its documentation is often clearer on specifics than the alternative.

What not to do

Do not build two versions of your site for two engines. The work that satisfies one satisfies the other.

Do not chase small differences in reported numbers between them. They count differently.

Do not ignore it because of the search share. The setup cost is twenty minutes, once.

Do not build two versions of your site for two engines. The work that satisfies one satisfies the other, and separate versions look manipulative.

How ours is wired

Every page written by Website Builder Studio enters a sitemap rebuilt from what actually exists, which is what both tools read.

Direct notification is part of how pages are published here, so new work is announced rather than waited on.

Every page also passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, which is what both engines are reading for.

Submission happens as part of publishing rather than as a separate chore, which means it does not depend on anybody remembering to do it after a busy release.

The same sitemap serves both, which is the argument for generating it from what exists rather than maintaining two lists — see sitemaps that actually help.