Why Bing Still Matters: Bing Places, Copilot and AI Search

Bing still matters because it is three things at once: the second largest search engine in the US, the listing source for Bing Maps, and the index that Microsoft Copilot and several other AI tools pull their answers from. StatCounter puts Bing at 18.8 percent of US desktop searches in September 2026, nearly 1 in 5. A business that skips Bing is not just giving up a slice of search traffic. It is often invisible in the AI answers built on top of it.

Last updated October 23, 2026. Reading time about 9 minutes.

Why is a Bing Places page important?

A Bing Places page is important because it controls how your business appears every time someone finds you through Microsoft. When Microsoft relaunched Bing Places for Business in October 2025, it moved the tool to bing.com/forbusiness and confirmed that a profile shows in Bing search results and on Bing Maps, including the place page people use to call, get directions or click through to your website. Microsoft also said it plans deeper integration with Copilot.

Think of it as the Microsoft version of your Google Business Profile. Same job, different audience. If you never claim it, Bing still builds a listing from data it finds around the web, and that is how service providers end up with an old phone number, a closed location or the wrong hours on a map they never look at.

Three reasons the page earns its afternoon of setup:

• It is your phone number on Microsoft surfaces. Windows search, Edge and Bing Maps all lean on the same Bing data.
• It is a trust signal AI tools can read. Consistent name, address and phone details across Google, Bing and Apple make it easier for an assistant to describe you correctly.
• It is free and imports from Google. The new Bing Places lets you import an existing Google Business Profile, so most of the work is checking fields rather than typing them.

We keep our own Bing Places listing verified for exactly these reasons, alongside Google and Apple Business Connect.

How many people actually use Bing?

More than most owners assume, especially during the workday. These are the September 2026 figures for the United States from StatCounter, which measures page views across a large network of sites.

The desktop number is the one service providers should care about. Desktop search skews toward office managers, property managers, purchasing staff and homeowners planning a project at a computer, which is exactly who books a contractor, a clinic or a B2B vendor. Many of them use Bing without choosing it, because it is the default in Windows and Microsoft Edge. That audience is the first reason Bing still matters for local businesses.

And the 9.48 percent figure undercounts Bing's reach. DuckDuckGo's own help pages state that most of its traditional search results currently come from Bing, so a page that is missing from Bing is usually missing from DuckDuckGo as well.

How does Bing feed Copilot, ChatGPT and other AI answers?

This is the part that changed the most in 2026, and it is the biggest reason Bing still matters now. It is also why a Bing strategy is now really an AI search optimization strategy.

Copilot is grounded in Bing. On February 10, 2026, Microsoft launched the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. It shows total citations, the average number of your pages cited each day, the grounding queries the AI used to retrieve your content, and citation counts for each URL. It covers Microsoft Copilot, AI generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.

ChatGPT search uses outside providers. OpenAI's help center explains that ChatGPT search rewrites your question into one or more targeted queries and sends them to search providers, and it names Microsoft among those providers. OpenAI does not publish the full mix, so treat Bing as one important input rather than the only one.

Microsoft keeps adding tools for this. In June 2026 it added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare to the AI Performance report. Then on October 13, 2026, it released Topics Portfolio in beta. It groups your grounding queries into themes and adds a list of Top Opportunity Queries, the AI searches where other sites are cited and yours is not. Microsoft's own guidance is to treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger, and the tab only appears when a site has enough data.

For a business owner, that last report is the headline. It is the first free tool from a major search engine that shows you, by topic, where a competitor is being recommended by an AI assistant instead of you. We cover the content side of earning those citations in our guide to getting cited by AI search.

Google vs Bing: what is different for your business?

Sources: StatCounter, Microsoft Bing Webmaster blog, OpenAI Help Center, DuckDuckGo Help Pages, IndexNow.org.

The takeaway from the table is not that Bing beats Google. It does not. Bing still matters because it hands you better feedback for very little work, and that feedback now includes AI visibility, which is the number most owners are guessing at.

How do you get your business on Bing in one afternoon?

Knowing why Bing still matters is only useful if you act on it. Here is the exact order we use for clients. Each step builds on the one before it.

What mistakes keep businesses invisible on Bing?

The last item matters more than it looks. AI assistants lift clear, self contained answers. A page that opens with a story about your company history gives them nothing to quote. A page that opens with what you do, where, and for whom is easy to cite. Our local SEO work rewrites service pages in exactly that shape.

Best practices and pro tips from our Bing audits

• Treat Bing as a free second opinion on your site. Bing Webmaster Tools often surfaces crawl and markup issues that Search Console reports differently. Fixing them helps both engines.
• Use the same categories on Google and Bing. Category mismatch is one of the most common reasons a business shows for the wrong searches on one map and not the other. Our map pack guide explains how categories drive relevance.
• Watch grounding queries, not just keywords. The grounding queries in AI Performance are the actual phrases an AI used to find you. They are often longer and more conversational than anything in a keyword tool.
• Pair Bing with an llms.txt and clean structured data. They are small additions that make your pages easier for machines to interpret. See our explainer on the llms.txt file for what it does and does not do.
• Do not expect guarantees. No search engine, Google or Bing, guarantees placement. Anyone promising a top spot on either is selling something they cannot control.

What happens if you ignore Bing?

Nothing dramatic, which is exactly why Bing still matters and why it is so easy to neglect. You will not get a warning. You simply will not show up for nearly 1 in 5 desktop searchers, for most DuckDuckGo users, and for many Copilot answers, and you will have no report telling you so. Meanwhile a competitor who spent one afternoon on Bing Places and Bing Webmaster Tools collects those calls and gets a free monthly view of where AI is recommending them. If you want a second set of eyes on where your business stands across Google, Bing and AI answers, our SEO team can run that check for you.

Frequently asked questions about Bing

The bottom line

Why Bing still matters comes down to reach plus feedback. Bing is no longer just the search engine your customers forgot about. It is a listing on Bing Maps, a feed for Copilot and other AI assistants, and a free report card on how often AI cites you. Claim your Bing Places page, connect Bing Webmaster Tools, turn on IndexNow, and check the AI Performance report once a month. That is the whole job, and most of your competitors have not done it.