Bing and Copilot send real buyers to ecommerce stores, yet most Shopify sellers ignore them. Here's why 10 minutes of setup pays off, with specific data.
Bing and Copilot Send Buyers Too - the Engine Your Store Ignores matters more than most guides admit. If your store's traffic plan begins and ends with Google, Bing and Copilot are sending buyers to your competitors for free. That's the short version. The longer version involves a search engine with nearly 10% of US market share, an AI shopping assistant built into every Windows device, and a setup process that takes about ten minutes.
Bing is easy to dismiss when you look at global share. But global share isn't where the interesting data lives.
Now here's the part most SEO posts bury: Bing traffic converts differently. In a dataset of 100 brands tracked across both search engines, Bing Organic delivered a 3.6% conversion rate and $8.85 revenue per session, compared to 1.2% and $2.65 for Google Organic. The same analysis notes that Bing sends fewer sessions, but each one is worth roughly 3.3 times more, consistent with Bing's older, desktop-heavy, more affluent user base.
The reason is demographic. Bing is the default on every Windows PC and every Microsoft Edge install. That skews the user base toward professionals, higher-income households, and older buyers who don't tweak browser defaults. These aren't casual scrollers. They're people who already know what they want.
Bing alone would be reason enough to spend ten minutes on setup. But Copilot changes the math significantly.
Microsoft Copilot Shopping is an AI product discovery assistant built into Windows 11, Microsoft Edge, Bing search, and Copilot.com. When a shopper asks it a buying question, say, "what's the best cordless drill under $200", Copilot pulls product recommendations, prices, and links from Bing's web index, Microsoft's commerce product graph, and direct merchant partnerships.
The AI-driven traffic numbers coming out of Microsoft's own platform data are striking. AI-driven ecommerce traffic reportedly surged 800% year-over-year during peak shopping moments like Black Friday. Meanwhile, Microsoft's own performance data shows that shoppers using Copilot when purchase intent is present are 194% more likely to complete a purchase, and Brand Agent sessions (Copilot's merchant-specific tool) deliver an average 2x conversion lift compared to unassisted sessions.
Vendor-sourced metrics deserve a note of caution, as they're observational and from Microsoft's own partner materials. But even discounted, the directional signal is clear: Copilot is reaching high-intent shoppers, not casual browsers.
Here's the reason Bing Webmaster Tools went from "nice to have" to "genuinely important" in 2025 and 2026: ChatGPT Search retrieves web results from Bing's index.
ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users by early 2026. When a user turns on ChatGPT's web search mode, the results it fetches and cites largely come from Bing's index. One study by Seer Interactive found that 87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing's top organic results.
If your store isn't properly indexed in Bing, you're effectively invisible to that entire surface. This isn't because of anything you did wrong on ChatGPT, but because you never verified your site with Bing Webmaster Tools. That's a fixable problem, and it takes about ten minutes to fix.
For more on how to appear in AI-generated answers, see our piece on how to get cited by AI search engines.
Here's a practical breakdown of what you actually get from setting up Bing properly, ranked by impact for ecommerce stores.
Every product page, buying guide, and blog post you've already published on your Shopify store is eligible to rank on Bing. You're likely already getting some Bing traffic without realizing it. Verifying your site in Bing Webmaster Tools gives you the analytics to see exactly which queries are sending traffic and where you're ranking, separate from Google Search Console. The two dashboards often reveal very different keyword opportunities.
Copilot Shopping draws product data from two primary sources: Microsoft Merchant Center (which processes the same type of product feed as Google Merchant Center) and live web crawling via Bingbot. Merchants who have both a complete Merchant Center feed and crawlable buying-guide content on their site earn the most consistent Copilot recommendations. If you already run a Google Shopping feed, replicating it in Microsoft Merchant Center is mostly a copy-paste exercise.
IndexNow is an open protocol, native to Bing Webmaster Tools, that notifies Bing the moment you publish or update a page. Instead of waiting days or weeks for Bingbot to crawl your new product or blog post, IndexNow sends a ping and Bing typically crawls within 24 hours. A single IndexNow submission also notifies other participating engines, including Yandex, Naver, and Seznam, simultaneously.
For Shopify stores, this matters every time you update a seasonal page, publish a new buying guide, or add a product. Fast indexing means faster AI citation opportunities too, since freshness is a documented signal in how AI engines select sources. If you want to see how content freshness plays into AI search, our AI visibility tracking guide covers the measurement side in detail.
Because ChatGPT Search retrieves results from Bing's index, every page that's properly indexed in Bing is a potential ChatGPT answer source. This is the multiplier effect: one round of Bing setup work gives you exposure on Bing.com, Microsoft Copilot, Edge browser search, Yahoo (which also pulls from Bing's index), and ChatGPT's web browsing mode. Most stores focus exclusively on Google and inadvertently opt themselves out of all of these surfaces at once.
This article is about organic and AI search, but Microsoft Advertising (Bing's ad platform) typically shows 30% lower CPC than Google Ads for comparable keywords, which makes it relevant context. Fewer advertisers chase Bing inventory, which keeps auction prices down. If you ever want to put paid spend behind a product launch or seasonal push, Bing is where budget goes further. That's a separate conversation from the free organic and Copilot work covered here, but it's another reason not to treat Bing as irrelevant.
The setup is fast. Here's what the setup looks like in practice:
That's the whole setup. You don't need a new content strategy or a separate blog for Bing. The same buying guides, comparison posts, and product pages you're already publishing for Google work for Bing. They just need to be indexed there too. For ideas on what content to publish in the first place, our guide on finding low-competition keywords your competitors haven't blogged about applies equally to Bing as it does to Google.
In early 2026, Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout, a feature that lets shoppers complete purchases directly inside a Copilot conversation, powered by Stripe and PayPal. The merchant remains the merchant of record: you own the customer relationship, fulfillment, and returns. Shopify merchants are being auto-enrolled through PayPal's Store Sync integration, which connects your catalog to Copilot's purchasing flow without additional development work.
Etsy, one of the early launch partners, described the logic plainly: "we're meeting buyers at the moment intent becomes action." That's the value proposition in plain terms. A shopper asks Copilot for a gift recommendation, sees your product, and checks out, all without landing on your site at all. You get the order, Copilot gets the assist.
This is still early. Agentic commerce (AI-driven purchases) accounts for a small percentage of total ecommerce today. But the trajectory matters, and the cost to be present is low. Merchants who set up their Microsoft Merchant Center feed now are positioned for the next two to three years of Copilot's growth, not just the current moment.
The case for Bing and Copilot isn't "abandon your Google strategy." It's "stop opting yourself out of a free channel that sends higher-converting buyers, feeds three AI systems, and takes less than an hour to set up."
The stores that will win at AI-assisted search over the next few years are the ones publishing consistent, structured content and making sure that content is indexed everywhere it can be. Google is table stakes. Bing is the unlock most sellers have never touched.
The setup is boring. That's why almost no one has done it. And that's exactly why setting up now gives you an edge, before your competitors figure it out too.
Yes. Bing holds about 10% of US searches and roughly 16–18% of US desktop searches. For a store doing 5,000 Google organic sessions a month, that could represent 500–900 additional sessions, at a conversion rate that's historically 3x higher than Google organic traffic.
ChatGPT Search retrieves web results from Bing's index, so pages not indexed in Bing are less likely to appear in ChatGPT's web browsing responses. One Seer Interactive study found that 87% of ChatGPT Search citations matched Bing's top organic results. Proper Bing indexing via Webmaster Tools is the baseline requirement.
IndexNow is an open protocol that instantly notifies Bing (and other participating engines) when you publish or update a page. Instead of waiting days for a crawl, Bing typically indexes new content within 24 hours. Shopify stores can enable it through an app like InstaIndex or by configuring the IndexNow API directly. Setup is one-time, then automatic.
Create a product feed in Microsoft Merchant Center (the attribute structure is nearly identical to Google Merchant Center). Copilot draws product data from this feed and from Bingbot's crawl of your site. Merchants with both a complete Merchant Center feed and crawlable buying-guide content on their site earn the most consistent Copilot recommendations.
Copilot Checkout lets shoppers complete purchases directly inside a Microsoft Copilot conversation, powered by Stripe and PayPal. Shopify merchants can participate through PayPal's Store Sync integration. The merchant remains the merchant of record. You own fulfillment, returns, and the customer relationship.
Bing Webmaster Tools verification, sitemap submission, and IndexNow setup takes about 10–20 minutes, especially if you import your existing Google Search Console property. Creating a Microsoft Merchant Center feed from an existing Google Shopping feed typically takes another 30–60 minutes depending on catalog size.
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