Bing and Copilot: The Local Channel Everyone Forgets

Every local business owner knows they need a Google Business Profile. A much smaller number have ever opened Bing Places.

That gap is the opportunity, because Copilot is grounded in Bing.

What Copilot draws on

Copilot is Microsoft's assistant, and it is built on Microsoft's data:

• Bing's search index — what Bing has crawled
• Bing Places — the local business data, Microsoft's equivalent of Google Business Profile
• Bing Maps — location and proximity
• Reviews aggregated into Bing's local data, including from third-party sources

It is a separate stack from ChatGPT's. Ask both the same local question and you can get different businesses, because they are reading different sources.

Why the distribution matters more than the market share

Bing's search share is a fraction of Google's, which is why most local businesses ignore it.

But Copilot is not a website people have to choose to visit. It is built into Windows, into Edge, and into Microsoft 365. It appears in the taskbar, in the browser sidebar, and inside Word, Outlook, and Teams.

For workplace users — including the person at a property management company looking for a commercial HVAC contractor, or the office manager finding a locksmith for the building — Copilot is frequently the assistant that is simply there.

That skews the audience toward commercial and B2B-adjacent local services, which are often your highest-value jobs.

The twenty-minute setup

1. Claim Bing Places

Go to Bing Places for Business. Search for your business — it may already exist as an unclaimed listing scraped from other sources.

2. Import from Google

Bing Places offers direct import from Google Business Profile. Use it. It pulls your name, address, phone, hours, categories, and photos across in one step.

This is the whole reason this is a twenty-minute job rather than an afternoon.

3. Review every field after import

The import is not always complete. Check specifically:

• Categories — Bing's taxonomy differs from Google's; the mapping is imperfect
• Services — often incomplete after import
• Service areas — verify your cities came across individually
• Description — check it imported and reads correctly
• Hours — including any special or holiday hours
• Photos — confirm they transferred

4. Verify

Phone, email, or postcard. Same process as Google.

5. Match everything to canonical

Your Bing listing must match your Google listing, your website, and your schema exactly — same name, same phone, same address format. A Bing listing that disagrees adds an inconsistency rather than a signal.

Beyond the listing

Bing Webmaster Tools

Free, and worth twenty more minutes. Submit your sitemap, check for crawl errors, and see which queries you appear for in Bing.

It also has a useful side benefit: it surfaces indexing problems that sometimes affect Google too, and its diagnostics are occasionally more direct than Search Console's.

Check that Bingbot is not blocked

Same robots.txt check as the AI crawlers. Bingbot should be allowed. Some aggressive bot-blocking configurations catch it.

Microsoft Advertising

If you run Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising will import your campaigns directly. Costs per click are typically lower because competition is thinner. For local service categories it is often worth a small parallel budget.

This is separate from organic Copilot visibility, in the same way Google Ads is separate from ranking.

Testing your Copilot presence

Open Copilot — in Edge's sidebar, in Windows, or at copilot.microsoft.com — and ask your top customer questions with your city.

Note who gets named. Note whether you do. Note which sources it cites.

Do this alongside your ChatGPT and Perplexity checks. Differences between them tell you something: if you appear in ChatGPT but not Copilot, your Bing-side presence is the gap. If you appear in neither, the problem is upstream in your entity and directory work.

The honest sizing

This is not going to transform your business. Volume through Copilot for a local service query is small compared to Google.

The reason to do it is the ratio. Twenty minutes of work, a channel most competitors have not touched, and a distribution advantage into workplace users who skew toward commercial work.

It belongs on the list right after Google and before almost everything else, purely on effort-to-return.

What to do this week

1. Claim your Bing Places listing and import from Google.
2. Review every field, especially categories, services, and service areas.
3. Verify the listing.
4. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.
5. Confirm Bingbot is not blocked in robots.txt.
6. Ask Copilot your top three customer questions and note who gets named.

Then check the rest

Copilot is one channel of several. Our free scan covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews with twenty-five real customer questions, so you can see the whole picture rather than one assistant at a time.

About fifteen seconds, free, no account.