Of the 201,000 US dental practices audited by The Dental Index, 61% had never submitted their website to Bing Webmaster Tools. Most of those practice owners did not know Bing Webmaster Tools existed. They had Google Search Console set up, a solid Maps presence, and a Google Ads account. They had built their entire digital presence on the assumption that Google was the internet. Then ChatGPT arrived. ChatGPT Search indexes from Bing. Their Google presence was invisible to the AI platform their patients were increasingly using to find dentists. The fix exists, it takes 15 minutes, and it is still uncompleted by the majority of practices in every market.
You built your entire digital practice on Google. ChatGPT does not use Google. 61% of practices have never told Bing they exist.
Step 1: Create or sign in to a Microsoft account
Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft account. If you do not have one, create one, it takes 2 minutes and the account is free. Use a practice email address if possible so access is tied to the practice rather than a personal account.
Step 2: Add your website and verify ownership
Click 'Add your site' and enter your practice website URL. Bing will ask you to verify ownership via one of three methods: HTML meta tag (paste a line of code into your website's
), XML file upload, or CNAME record via your DNS provider. The HTML meta tag method is the fastest if you have access to your website's code or CMS. If your website is on a platform like Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress, there are step-by-step guides for adding the meta tag within each platform's settings.Step 3: Submit your XML sitemap
Your sitemap is a file (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) that lists all the pages on your website. After verifying ownership, go to 'Sitemaps' in the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard and submit your sitemap URL. This tells Bing which pages exist and should be crawled. If you do not have a sitemap, most website platforms generate one automatically, check yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in your browser first.
Step 4: Manually submit your top 3 priority pages
Go to 'URL Inspection' in the Bing dashboard and manually submit your most important pages for immediate crawl prioritisation: your homepage, your primary procedure page (implants, cosmetic, or whatever drives your highest-value cases), and your most recent published article. Manual submission tells Bing these pages are high priority and should be crawled ahead of the general queue.
Step 5: Verify Bing indexation within 2 weeks
After submission, check Bing's crawl progress in the 'Crawl' section of Webmaster Tools. You can also verify indexation directly: open Bing.com and search 'site:yourwebsite.com', if results appear, Bing has indexed your site. If no results appear after 3 weeks, check that your website's robots.txt file is not blocking Bing's crawler (BingBot) and that your sitemap was submitted correctly.