5 Sitemaps Best Practices For Bing

Bing holds roughly 3-4% of global search market share in 2026, a distant second to Google. But its influence is larger than that share suggests: Bing powers the default search in Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia, and its index backs ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot — making a well-indexed site on Bing a prerequisite for AI-search visibility beyond Google. If you haven’t already set up sitemaps specifically for Bing, it’s worth 30 minutes of attention.

Most modern CMSes (WordPress with Yoast, Rank Math, or AIOSEO; Shopify; Webflow) generate XML sitemaps automatically. If you’re creating or editing sitemaps manually, stick to these best practices. They apply equally to Google, but Bing has a few quirks worth calling out.

1. Follow the sitemap protocol limits. Per the official sitemaps.org protocol, a single XML sitemap can list up to 50,000 URLs and must stay under 50 MB uncompressed. (The older 10 MB cap was raised to 50 MB in 2016; articles still referencing the 10 MB limit are out of date.) Larger sites use a sitemap index file that points to multiple sitemaps.
2. List only canonical, indexable URLs. Exclude redirects, 404s, noindex’d pages, and parameter-decorated duplicates. A sitemap full of dead or duplicate URLs wastes Bing’s crawl budget and weakens the signal. Most SEO plugins filter automatically; manual sitemaps should be regenerated periodically (weekly is plenty for most sites, not daily) and audited for broken entries.
3. Pick the right format. XML sitemaps are the universal standard. Use a sitemap index file if your site has more than 50,000 URLs or if you want to split content by type (products, posts, pages). For frequently-updated content, an RSS feed as a supplementary sitemap helps Bing discover new URLs faster. Submit both through Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Consolidate into one sitemap index. Don’t scatter dozens of standalone XML files across the site. Point one master sitemap index file at every sub-sitemap you need, reference it in robots.txt, and submit the index URL to Bing Webmaster Tools. RSS feeds should list only your most recent content, not your full archive.
5. Use IndexNow for real-time updates. Microsoft launched IndexNow in October 2021 as a free protocol that lets sites instantly notify Bing (and Yandex, Seznam.cz, and other participating engines) whenever a URL is added, updated, or deleted. IndexNow replaces the older ping-endpoint pattern and is dramatically faster than waiting for Bing to re-crawl your sitemap. Most major CMSes support it through plugins (Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO all include IndexNow integration), and Cloudflare can proxy IndexNow submissions for any site behind its CDN.

Large Sites: Prioritize Ruthlessly

For sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs, sitemap best practices shift in emphasis. Bing (like Google) doesn’t magically crawl every URL you submit — crawl budget applies equally to both. Include only your important, indexable URLs in the sitemap. Exclude pagination beyond the first page, faceted-navigation combinations, tag archives that don’t carry unique value, and any low-quality sections you wouldn’t want surfaced in results.

For large sites, organize sitemaps by content type (products, blog posts, categories) so you can track crawl and indexing performance separately in Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit new sitemaps as you add content sections; don’t rely on a single sprawling file.

Why Bing Matters More in 2026

Two shifts have pushed Bing from “afterthought” to “worth the setup effort”:

• ChatGPT Search runs on Bing’s index. When ChatGPT answers a question and cites web sources, those citations come from Bing’s crawl. A site that’s indexed well on Bing is visible in ChatGPT; a site that isn’t, isn’t.
• Microsoft Copilot (across Windows, Office, and Edge) uses Bing. Enterprise users asking Copilot questions are pulling from Bing-indexed content.

The best-practice list above isn’t Bing-exclusive — most of it applies to Google too — but submitting your sitemap through Bing Webmaster Tools and enabling IndexNow takes less than an hour and opens up non-Google search visibility that used to feel optional. In 2026, it isn’t.

For a broader look at sitemaps across both major engines, see our guide on what Google says about sitemaps.