Quick question: when's the last time anyone pitched you Bing SEO?
Probably never. The entire local marketing industry is built around Google, and for good reason. Google handles the overwhelming majority of searches, your customers say "I Googled you," and your Google Business Profile drives more phone calls than the rest of your online presence combined. None of that is changing in this article.
But something interesting happened over the last couple of years, mostly without small business owners noticing. A meaningful number of people stopped starting their search for a contractor on a search engine at all. They ask ChatGPT. "Who's a good roofer near Wilmington?" "Find me a commercial cleaning company that does medical offices." And when ChatGPT goes out to the live web to answer questions like that, its search features draw heavily on Bing's index.
Which means the search engine everyone ignores has quietly become a back door into the AI tools everyone's talking about. Let's talk about why that matters, what it doesn't mean, and the one-hour setup that gets you in the game.
The honest version of the ChatGPT-Bing connection
Let's be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of claim that marketing pitches inflate into nonsense.
OpenAI has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft, and ChatGPT's web search capabilities have drawn heavily on Bing's search infrastructure. When ChatGPT needs current, real-world information, like which businesses exist in a town and what they do, Bing's index has been a major source feeding those answers. Other AI assistants lean on Bing too, partly because Microsoft sells search API access while Google mostly keeps its index to itself.
What we can't tell you is the exact plumbing on any given day, because these companies change their arrangements and don't publish the details. AI companies add sources, build their own crawlers, and renegotiate deals. So the careful claim is this: being well-indexed on Bing materially improves your odds of being visible to AI search tools, and being invisible on Bing means at least one major pipeline of AI answers can't see you at all.
That's not a guarantee of anything. It's an odds play. But it's an odds play that costs about an hour, which changes the math completely.
Why this is an asymmetric bet
Think about the effort-to-competition ratio for a second.
On Google, every competitor you have is at least trying. They have a profile, somebody claimed their listing, half of them are paying an agency. You're fighting for position in the most contested arena in marketing.
On Bing, most of your local competitors have never logged in. Many of their sites are indexed poorly or not at all, because nobody ever checked. The arena is close to empty.
Now add the AI layer. When someone asks an AI assistant for a plumber recommendation, the assistant typically surfaces a handful of names, not ten blue links and three pages of ads. If the index feeding that answer can only see four plumbers in your county properly, and you're one of them, you just became 25 percent of the consideration set. That's a visibility position you could never buy on Google at any price.
Will AI referrals replace Google for local business? We doubt it, at least not soon. The volume today is small compared to traditional search. But the volume is growing, the people using it skew toward exactly the kind of customer who researches before buying, and the cost of being present is nearly zero. Small but growing demand, near-zero competition, near-zero cost. You don't need a crystal ball to take that bet.
The setup: Bing Webmaster Tools in about an hour
Here's the actual work. None of it requires a marketing budget, and if you already have Google Search Console set up, it's even faster.
Step 1: Create your Bing Webmaster Tools account
Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in with a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. This is Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console: a free dashboard showing how Bing sees your site, what you rank for, and whether anything's broken.
Step 2: Import from Google Search Console if you have it
This is the cheat code. Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified sites directly from Google Search Console, which means you skip the verification dance entirely. Two clicks, grant permission, done. If you don't have Search Console set up either, that's worth fixing regardless of anything in this article, and you can verify with Bing separately by adding a small file or DNS record. Your web person can do either in minutes.
Step 3: Submit your sitemap
A sitemap is just a file listing every page on your site, and any properly built website already has one, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Paste that address into the Sitemaps section of Bing Webmaster Tools. This tells Bing exactly what to crawl instead of leaving it to wander.
Step 4: Submit your important pages directly
Here's a genuinely nice feature Google doesn't really match: Bing lets you submit URLs directly for indexing, in batches, and tends to pick them up fast. Submit your homepage, every service page, your service area pages, and your contact page. If you publish something new, like a blog post or a new service page, submit it then too. Newer sites face daily submission caps, but for a typical local business site with a few dozen pages, the caps are a non-issue.
Step 5: Claim Bing Places
Separate from Webmaster Tools, Bing Places is the equivalent of your Google Business Profile: hours, phone, photos, service area. It can import from your Google profile, so this takes minutes, and it's the data layer that map-style and "near me" answers pull from. While you're doing profile housekeeping, make sure your Google profile is current too via the Google Business Profile help center, since assistants cross-check sources and consistency wins ties.
Step 6: Check back once a month
That's the whole maintenance plan. Glance at the dashboard, confirm pages are indexed, look at what queries are showing your site, fix anything flagged. Ten minutes.
What actually ranks on Bing
Here's the part that should be reassuring: you don't need a separate strategy. The fundamentals that work on Google work on Bing. Pages about your actual services in plain language, accurate business information, a site that loads fast and works on phones, content that genuinely answers customers' questions.
There are small differences in emphasis. Bing has historically been a bit more literal about exact words on the page, so plainly naming your services and your city matters ("water heater replacement in Wilmington, NC" beats "solutions for your comfort needs"). But notice that this is just good practice anyway. It's the same clear, direct, question-answering content that wins featured snippets and feeds AI answers everywhere. We build every site this way for exactly that reason; it's the core of our website and SEO service.
One thing not to do: don't write separate "Bing content" or buy a "Bing SEO package" if anyone ever invents one. The whole point of this channel is that it's free leverage on work you should already be doing. The moment it becomes a retainer, the math dies.
How to check if it's working
Two simple tests, no tools required.
First, search Bing for your business name. You should see your website, your Bing Places listing, and accurate information. Then search for your main service plus your city and see where you land. Note it, and check again in a couple of months.
Second, ask ChatGPT or another AI assistant the way a customer would: "Who does [your service] in [your town]?" Do it a few times, phrased a few ways, because AI answers vary run to run. If you show up, great. If competitors show up and you don't, you've just seen the gap this article is about, and you know it's costing you real inquiries from people who never saw a search results page at all.
We've watched this play out across our own portfolio. Sites built with clean structure and direct answers get picked up, cited, and recommended by AI tools, and the businesses that aren't indexed simply don't exist in those conversations. For a deeper look at the trend, our piece on what AI search means for local business covers the bigger picture; the trade-specific version is on pages like roofing and trucking.
The window here is the good part and the perishable part. Right now, showing up in AI answers is cheap because nobody's competing for it. That won't stay true forever. The agencies will catch up, the pitches will start, and the empty arena will fill in. The hour you spend this week is worth more than the same hour two years from now.
Want this handled for you?
Every website we build at Omnyra ships with this baked in: indexed on Google and Bing, structured for AI search, submitted and verified, with the business profiles squared away. We're a veteran-owned shop in Wilmington, NC, with 1,500+ small business sites built in the last 90 days, including portfolio clients like airsupporthvac.com, sanosteam.com, and ramartrans.com.
The build is done-with-you: live on a call, first draft in 24 hours, live in 7 days guaranteed. Minimal starts at $500. Standard is $2,000 plus $200/mo and includes the full SEO and AI-search setup this article describes. Max is $3,500 plus $400/mo and adds a 24/7 AI receptionist. Super Max starts at $6,000. Pay-in-4 and Klarna are available.
Book a call or look over pricing. And if you'd rather do the Bing setup yourself this weekend, genuinely, go do it. It's an hour, it's free, and it's the most underpriced visibility move available to a local business right now.