Most developers treat Bing as a rounding error. It's a small share of classic search, so "submit the sitemap once and forget it" felt fine.

In 2026 that's a mistake. ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot both draw on Bing's index to find pages to cite. If Bing hasn't crawled your new docs page, or still has last month's version of your pricing page, those assistants are working from stale or missing information.

Bing supports a simple fix: IndexNow , a protocol that lets you push "this URL changed" instead of waiting for a crawler to notice. It takes about 30 minutes to wire into a Next.js deploy.

What IndexNow is (and isn't)

Is: an open protocol ( indexnow.org ). You POST a list of changed URLs, and participating search engines (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and others) share the notification with each other.

Isn't: a ranking boost, or a way into Google. Google doesn't use IndexNow, so keep your sitemap and Search Console set up for Google.

Isn't: a guarantee. It tells Bing to look .…