Bing just hit a billion users and the SEO industry is still pretending it doesn’t exist

Microsoft reported earnings yesterday. Bing's search and advertising revenue grew 12% year-on-year, and the platform crossed a billion monthly active users for the first time. That's a milestone worth sitting with for a moment, because the SEO industry has spent roughly fifteen years treating Bing as a footnote — a polite asterisk in audits, an afterthought in reporting, the platform you mention when you've run out of things to say about Google.

That posture made sense when Bing's share was rounding-error territory. It doesn't anymore.

The interesting thing isn't the headline number. It's the trajectory. Microsoft's search revenue growth has been climbing for four consecutive quarters: 21%, 16%, 10%, now 12%. Google grew ad revenue 15.5% in the same window — strong, but no longer dramatically separating from the chasing pack. Fabrice Canel from Microsoft put it plainly on X: more growth in five years than the prior ten. The shape of the search market is genuinely changing, and most agencies are still drafting strategy decks for a world that ended about eighteen months ago.

Why this matters more than the raw numbers

A billion monthly active users is a credibility threshold. It's the number at which a platform stops being "the other search engine" and starts being a venue your clients' customers are actually using. But the more important shift is what's powering that growth: ChatGPT's web search runs on Bing's index. Copilot runs on Bing. Microsoft's enterprise AI integrations route through Bing. Every time someone asks ChatGPT a question that triggers a web lookup, Bing's grounding API gets a query.

That changes the calculation. Bing isn't just Bing anymore. It's the substrate underneath a meaningful chunk of consumer AI search. When you optimise for Bing, you're optimising for a layer of the AI stack that the loudest GEO voices are pretending doesn't exist while they sell you tools to track ChatGPT citations.

Bing isn't competing with Google for the same user. Bing is increasingly the plumbing under the AI surfaces those users have moved to.

The industry's blind spot is structural, not analytical

Why has Bing been ignored? Three reasons, none of them good.

A lot of "AI search optimisation" advice being sold right now is built on the assumption that ChatGPT and Perplexity are exotic, hard-to-reach surfaces requiring specialist intervention.

The first is inertia. The agency world built its tooling, training, and reporting around Google. Switching costs are real. It's easier to keep selling Google-shaped audits than to retool.

The second is volume bias. For a long time, Bing genuinely wasn't worth optimising for in isolation — the traffic-to-effort ratio was poor. That maths has shifted, but the received wisdom hasn't caught up.

The third is more uncomfortable. A lot of "AI search optimisation" advice being sold right now is built on the assumption that ChatGPT and Perplexity are exotic, hard-to-reach surfaces requiring specialist intervention. If you tell clients that ChatGPT's web results come from the same Bing index they've been ignoring for a decade — and that traditional Bing Webmaster Tools hygiene is most of the work — the consulting story gets less impressive.

That's the loop. And we built it.

What actually changes in your workflow

I'm not going to pretend Bing optimisation is a separate discipline. It isn't. It's mostly the same SEO fundamentals applied to a platform people forgot existed. But there are concrete things worth doing this week if you haven't.

Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't. The index is more aggressive about taking direct submissions than Google is, and the lag from "submitted" to "indexed" is often hours rather than weeks. For new content, that's a genuine advantage.

Check your IndexNow integration. WordPress sites in particular often have IndexNow plugins installed and never configured properly. It's a fifteen-minute job that materially affects how quickly Bing — and by extension, ChatGPT's web search — sees new content.

Look at your Bing Webmaster Tools crawl reports the way you'd look at Google Search Console. The errors are different. The patterns are different. I see clients with clean GSC reports and Bing reports full of issues nobody's looked at in three years.

Audit your structured data with Bing's tooling specifically. Bing weighs schema differently to Google in ways that matter for AI grounding — it's more literal, less inference-heavy. If your schema is sloppy but Google's algorithms are forgiving, Bing will surface that as a problem.

The reporting question nobody's asking

Here's what's going to happen over the next twelve months. Clients who've been told "we don't need to worry about Bing" are going to start seeing referrer data they don't recognise — bing.com referrals climbing, ChatGPT sending traffic, Copilot citations appearing in branded search reports. They'll ask their agency why. The honest answer is that the agency stopped paying attention to a platform that quietly tripled in strategic importance.

Most agencies will not give the honest answer. They'll add a Bing line item to the next invoice and call it AI search optimisation.

If you're an in-house marketer, the question to ask your agency this week is straightforward: when did you last review our Bing Webmaster Tools account, and can you show me the report? If the answer is uncomfortable silence, you've learned something useful.

What this doesn't mean

Bing crossing a billion users doesn't mean Google is in trouble. Google grew ad revenue 22% overall and 15.5% on search. The total search pie is expanding — that's the headline that keeps getting buried under the AI-killed-search panic. What's changing is the distribution. Google is no longer the only venue that matters at meaningful scale, and pretending otherwise is now an active strategic mistake rather than a forgivable simplification.

It also doesn't mean every business needs to retool tomorrow. If your customers are 95% Google-dependent for discovery, your priorities don't change much. But that 95% number is doing a lot of work in most agency decks, and almost nobody is measuring it properly. The honest answer for most UK businesses I work with is "we don't actually know our discovery split, because our analytics setup has assumed Google for so long that everything else gets bucketed as 'other'."

The take

Bing has been the punchline of SEO conferences for fifteen years. It's now the index underneath ChatGPT, a billion-user platform in its own right, and the fastest-growing meaningful search surface in the market. The industry's continued dismissal of it isn't analysis — it's habit. And habits that survive after the conditions that justified them have changed are how agencies end up explaining to clients why they missed the shift.

The fundamentals haven't changed. The venues have. If your measurement framework still treats Bing as a rounding error, you're not measuring the modern search market. You're measuring 2018.