Bing and Copilot are the AI shopping channel most stores forget

When store owners think about AI shopping, they think about ChatGPT first, then maybe Perplexity and Gemini. Bing barely gets a mention. And Copilot, Microsoft's assistant, is the one people forget they have, even though it sits inside Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365. That blind spot is exactly why it's worth a look. There's less competition for attention here, and the work to show up is some of the most boring, fixable stuff you'll ever do.

This post is the beginner-friendly version. By the end you'll know the four things that actually matter for Bing and Copilot, and roughly an hour of work to get them done.

Why Bing matters more than its market share suggests

Bing's slice of the search market is smaller than Google's, and on its own that makes it easy to ignore. But two things change the math for AI shopping. First, Copilot is Microsoft's own product. Its shopping answers are tied closely to Bing's index and shopping data, because that's the data Microsoft owns and controls. If Bing can't find your products, Copilot has very little to work with when someone asks it what to buy.

Second, and this is the part people miss, several AI assistants have historically leaned on Bing index data to one degree or another. That mix shifts over time and no single engine is the whole story, so I won't pretend to know the exact split today. But the practical takeaway holds up: being clean and findable in Bing is a quiet input into more AI answers than your raw Bing traffic number would suggest.

You're not optimizing for Bing's tiny click share. You're making sure the index that feeds Copilot and other assistants can actually see and understand your store.

The nice thing is that none of this is a separate project. The same clean pages, structured data, and unblocked crawlers that help you in ChatGPT and the other assistants help you here. Bing is just a second front door to the same house.

Step one: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools

This is the foundation, and it's free. Bing Webmaster Tools is Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console. It lets you prove you own the site, submit your sitemap, watch how Bing crawls you, and spot anything that's blocking its bot.

The shortcut most people don't know: if you're already set up in Google Search Console, Bing usually lets you import that verification directly. A couple of clicks and you're in, no DNS records or meta tags to fiddle with. If you're starting fresh, the meta tag or file-upload method works fine too.

Once you're verified, do three small things:

• Submit your sitemap. This hands Bing a clean list of every page you want indexed, including your product and collection pages.
• Check the crawl and indexing reports. They'll tell you if Bing is hitting errors, getting blocked, or quietly skipping pages.
• Confirm Bing's bot isn't blocked. Bing's crawler is bingbot. If your robots.txt blocks it, none of the rest matters. This is the same trap that catches stores out with AI bots, so it's worth a careful read.

That last point deserves a flag, because it's the most common silent failure. A line added by a developer or a plugin months ago can be quietly keeping you out. The same logic we cover in whether your store is accidentally blocking AI crawlers applies directly to bingbot.

Step two: use IndexNow so fresh pages get noticed fast

Stores change constantly. New products, price updates, items going in and out of stock. The slow way for a search engine to keep up is to crawl you over and over and hope it catches the changes. IndexNow is the fast way.

IndexNow is a simple protocol, supported by Bing, that lets your site ping the search engine the moment a page changes. Instead of waiting days for a crawler to wander back, you're telling it "this URL is new, go look now." For a busy store, that's the difference between a new product showing up in days versus showing up the same week you launch it.

Here's the good news for beginners: you may not have to do anything by hand. Many ecommerce platforms and SEO plugins support IndexNow automatically, sending pings in the background whenever you publish or update. So before you install anything, check whether your platform or SEO plugin already handles IndexNow. If it does, you're done. If it doesn't, it's a small, well-documented thing to add.

Why this matters for AI answers

An AI assistant can only recommend what's in the index it draws on. If your newest products take weeks to get crawled, they're invisible to Copilot during the exact window you most want to sell them. Fast indexing just closes the gap between "I published it" and "the machine knows it exists."

Step three: keep your Bing Merchant feed tidy

If you sell physical products, you can list them in Bing's shopping ecosystem through a merchant feed, the same way you'd submit a product feed to Google. This is the structured data Bing uses to understand your catalogue.

The word that matters here is tidy. A feed full of mismatched prices, missing images, or items marked in stock when they're sold out doesn't just hurt your shopping listings, it gives Copilot bad raw material. Keep the basics honest:

• Accurate prices and availability. If your feed says one thing and your site says another, you erode trust in both.
• Clear, specific titles. Describe the product the way a shopper would search for it, not in internal SKU-speak.
• Real stock status. Out-of-stock items handled badly can quietly drag down how AI sees your catalogue. We dug into that in how out-of-stock products affect AI visibility.
• Complete identifiers and images. The more cleanly a product is described, the more confidently an engine can surface it.

You don't need a perfect feed. You need an honest, complete one that matches your live site. Mismatches are what cause trouble.

Step four: remember that ranking in Bing feeds Copilot's answers

Here's the mental model to hold onto. Copilot doesn't invent recommendations out of thin air. When someone asks it what to buy, it leans on what Bing already knows: which pages rank well organically, what's in the shopping feed, and which brands show up repeatedly across the sites it trusts.

So the old, unglamorous work still counts. Ranking decently in Bing organic search, having genuine mentions and reviews around the web, and presenting clean structured data all feed the answer Copilot gives. This is the same reputation-and-clarity story that drives every AI assistant, which is why it's worth understanding how AI decides which products to recommend rather than chasing one platform's quirks. None of this is a separate AEO strategy bolted onto your site. It's the same fundamentals, pointed at a channel most of your competitors have ignored.

A simple order to do this in

If you've got an hour, here's a sane sequence. Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools first, importing from Google Search Console if you can. Submit your sitemap and confirm bingbot isn't blocked. Check whether IndexNow is already running through your platform or plugin, and turn it on if it isn't. Then open your merchant feed and fix the obvious stuff: prices, stock, titles, images. That's the whole job.

You won't see fireworks. Bing and Copilot are a steady, compounding channel, not an overnight one. But because so few stores bother, the ones that do get a quiet head start, and the work overlaps almost entirely with everything else you're doing for AI visibility.

If you'd rather see where you stand across all the assistants before you start fixing things, you can run a free AI visibility audit and we'll check whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI are naming your store. From there you'll know exactly which front doors are open and which ones, including this one, are worth your hour.