How to List Your Business on Bing (And Why Most Small Businesses Haven't Bothered)
- Mar 3
- 7 min read
Ask most small business owners about Bing and you will get a dismissive response. Nobody uses Bing. It does not matter. It is irrelevant compared to Google.
This view made a reasonable amount of sense in 2020. It makes significantly less sense in 2026.
Bing's market share has grown consistently since Microsoft integrated it into ChatGPT, Edge and a growing range of AI-powered tools. More importantly, when someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a local business, a service provider, or anything with a local search intent, ChatGPT is pulling that information predominantly from Bing's index and Bing Places data.
Which means that a business not listed on Bing Places is a business that ChatGPT cannot recommend. In a world where an increasing number of people are starting their searches with an AI tool rather than a search engine, that is a gap worth closing.
Getting listed on Bing Places takes about twenty minutes. The potential upside, appearing in AI-powered search results that your competitors are almost certainly absent from, is disproportionately large for such a small investment of time.
Why Bing Matters More Than Most People Think
The numbers are bigger than the reputation suggests
Bing consistently holds around 8 to 10 percent of the UK search market. That sounds small until you consider what it means in absolute terms. In a country of 67 million people, 8 percent of searches is not a trivial number. For a local business targeting a specific town or region, the volume of Bing searches relevant to their business is real and genuinely worth capturing.
Beyond raw market share, Bing powers search across Microsoft Edge, which is the default browser on every Windows device and has a substantial installed base in business environments. Many of your potential clients are searching on Bing without necessarily choosing to.
Bing feeds ChatGPT local results
This is the part that changes the calculation most significantly in 2026.
When ChatGPT's browsing capability is active and someone asks it a question with local intent, such as recommending a plumber in Ashford or finding an SEO agency in Kent, it draws on Bing's web index and Bing Places data to generate its answer. A business not present in Bing Places is a business that does not exist as far as ChatGPT's local recommendations are concerned.
The same is true for Microsoft Copilot, which is increasingly embedded across Microsoft 365 products that millions of UK businesses use daily. As AI assistants become more integrated into how people find and choose local services, Bing's role as the underlying data source becomes more significant, not less.
Bing Powers Apple Search and Siri in Some Contexts
Apple's Siri uses a combination of data sources for local search results, and Bing is among them. Listing your business accurately on Bing contributes to your visibility in voice search queries made through Apple devices, which remain one of the most common devices in the UK consumer market.
How to List Your Business on Bing Places: Step by Step
The process is straightforward and takes around twenty minutes for a complete setup.
Here is exactly what to do.
Go to bingplaces.com and sign in with a Microsoft account. If you do not have one, creating one is free and takes two minutes.
Search for your business name. Bing may already have a partial listing from data it has crawled elsewhere. If it does, you can claim that existing listing rather than creating from scratch.
If no existing listing is found, select 'Add your business' and enter your business details. Use your exact business name as it appears everywhere else online. Consistency matters for local SEO across all platforms.
Enter your full address exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile and your website. The same street address format, the same postcode. NAP consistency, name, address and phone number matching across all platforms, is a genuine local SEO signal.
Add your phone number and website URL. Use your main business phone number rather than a tracked number or secondary line.
Choose your business category carefully. Bing's category options differ slightly from Google's. Pick the most accurate primary category for your core service. You can add secondary categories for additional services.
Add your opening hours. If you are a service business without fixed hours, there is an option for this. Do not leave it blank.
Upload photos. At minimum, a professional logo and one photo representing your work or premises. Listings with photos perform better in local results.
Write a business description. This should naturally include your primary service and your main location. Keep it factual and specific rather than promotional. Bing's guidelines penalise descriptions that read like advertisements.
Verify your listing. Bing typically verifies by phone call or postcard. Choose the fastest option available. Your listing will not appear in results until verification is complete.
The single most important thing to get right is consistency. Your business name, address and phone number on Bing Places should be identical to how they appear on Google Business Profile, your website, and every other directory. Any discrepancy sends a confusing signal to search engines about which version of your details is correct.
Optimising Your Bing Places Listing Beyond the Basics
Getting listed is the first step. A complete, well-optimised listing performs significantly better than a minimal one. Here is what most businesses skip.
Services and products
Bing Places allows you to list specific services and products. Most businesses add their main category and stop there. Adding specific services, particularly ones that match the language people search for, directly improves how often your listing appears for relevant queries.
A web design agency that adds services including 'website design', 'SEO services', 'local SEO', 'Shopify web design' and 'branding and logo design' will appear in a broader range of searches than one that just lists 'web design agency'.
Business attributes
Bing Places has a section for business attributes such as whether you offer free consultations, whether you are woman-owned, whether you serve specific customer types. These attributes appear in your listing and can influence which searches it shows for. Fill in every attribute that accurately applies to your business.
Photos updated regularly
Bing rewards listings that show signs of active management. Adding new photos every few months signals that the listing is maintained and the business is active. This is a small thing that makes a measurable difference in local pack appearance frequency.
Respond to reviews
Bing does aggregate reviews from various sources and display them on business listings. Monitoring and responding to reviews on Bing, in the same way you would on Google, is good practice and signals active engagement with the platform.
Beyond Bing: The Other Platforms Feeding AI Search Results
Since we are on the topic of AI visibility, Bing Places is not the only platform worth addressing. Here are the others that contribute meaningfully to how AI tools find and recommend local businesses.
Apple Business Connect
Apple Business Connect is the platform that controls how your business appears on Apple Maps, in Siri results, and increasingly in Apple Intelligence responses. It is separate from Google and Bing and requires its own setup at businessconnect.apple.com.
Apple devices account for the majority of smartphone usage in the UK. Every one of those devices has Siri built in and Apple Maps as the default mapping application. A business not listed on Apple Business Connect is invisible to Siri and underrepresented on Apple Maps.
Setup takes around thirty minutes and follows a similar process to Google Business Profile and Bing Places. Verification is by postcard or phone. Do this immediately after completing your Bing Places listing.
Perplexity AI
Perplexity has its own web crawler called PerplexityBot. It indexes web content independently and uses it to generate answers in its AI search interface. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity does not rely solely on Bing. It crawls and indexes sites directly.
You cannot list a business on Perplexity the way you can on Bing or Apple. What you can do is make sure your website is crawlable and not blocking PerplexityBot in your robots.txt file. A well-structured website with clear, authoritative content about your services and location is what gets referenced in Perplexity answers.
Yell and other UK directories
Traditional UK directories like Yell, Thomson Local and Checkatrade feed into various aggregators that AI tools use as data sources for business information. Maintaining accurate, consistent listings on the major UK directories contributes to the overall data footprint that makes your business more recommendable by AI systems.
The key is consistency across all of them. The same business name, same address format, same phone number. Every inconsistency is a data conflict that makes AI tools less confident about recommending you accurately.
The Bigger Picture: Why AI Search Visibility Matters Now
The businesses that will have the strongest online presence in three to five years are the ones that start thinking about AI search visibility now, while most of their competitors are still focused exclusively on Google.
Google remains the dominant search engine and that is not changing imminently. But the way people search is changing. Voice search, AI assistants, ChatGPT queries, Copilot integrations are all growing as a share of how people find local businesses. Each of those channels has different underlying data sources, and each of those data sources needs to know your business exists.
Listing on Bing Places and Apple Business Connect does not take your attention away from Google. It takes about an hour in total and then requires modest ongoing maintenance. The return, appearing in AI-powered search results that your competitors are almost certainly absent from, is disproportionately large for that investment.
The businesses showing up in ChatGPT recommendations for local services in 2027 are the ones getting their Bing Places and Apple Business Connect listings right in 2026. This is a genuine first-mover opportunity and the window will not stay open indefinitely.
A Note on AI SEO as a Discipline
Optimising for AI search results, sometimes called GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), is an emerging discipline that goes beyond traditional SEO. It involves understanding how different AI tools source their information, structuring content so that AI systems can extract and cite it accurately, and maintaining a consistent, authoritative data presence across the platforms those AI tools index.
It is an area that most small businesses have not started thinking about and most local agencies are not yet offering. Which is exactly why it represents a significant opportunity for businesses willing to get ahead of it now.
If you want to understand what AI search visibility looks like for your specific business and what the practical steps are to improve it, get in touch. We offer a free website and SEO audit that now includes an assessment of your current AI search presence and what would make the biggest difference.
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