Let me borrow the framing from Ashur Homa’s LinkedIn post, because it said it plainly: ChatGPT does not search Google. It searches Bing.
Not Google. Bing.
This is not a minor technical footnote. If your business has spent years optimizing for Google — building backlinks, submitting sitemaps, managing your Google Search Console — and you’ve never touched Bing Webmaster Tools, you’re invisible to the AI assistant that most of your clients are currently using to research their options.
The actual AI search map
Different AI tools pull from different sources; most people don’t know this, and the gap between assumption and reality is where the problem lives. SEO strategist Jake Ward mapped this out in what he calls the Search Platform Tier List — the full diagram is worth looking up, and the short version is:
- ChatGPT searches Bing
- Google AI Overviews pull from Google’s own index
- Claude uses Brave Search
- Gemini pulls from Google
- Perplexity uses multiple sources, including Bing and Google
Google’s AI Overviews do pull from Google’s own index — so your Google SEO work matters there, and that effort isn’t wasted. Yoast has published a solid technical breakdown of how ChatGPT Search uses Bing’s infrastructure if you want to understand the plumbing. But the practical point is this: ChatGPT, which remains the most widely-used AI assistant in Canada, is running on Bing’s infrastructure, and your domain authority means nothing to it if you haven’t told Bing you exist.
Why this matters for how buyers find you
When a potential client asks ChatGPT “Who does X in Ontario?” or “What should I look for in a Y consultant?” — the answer it generates is built from Bing’s index. If your website isn’t in that index, you aren’t in the answer.
This matters differently depending on your business. If most of your clients find you through referrals, your immediate exposure may be limited — the referral chain still runs through people, not models. But if any part of your client acquisition involves people researching options before they reach out, the AI-mediated version of that research is increasingly the first step. And if that first step doesn’t surface you, the referral you were counting on may never turn into a conversation.
Most Canadian SMBs have done their SEO work almost entirely through Google, for obvious reasons — Google has the largest share of traditional web search, and the tools are well-established and familiar. But the shift to AI-mediated search doesn’t follow the same distribution. The AI assistant a buyer uses isn’t necessarily the search engine they used to use.
Bing’s share of traditional search is relatively small. Bing’s role in AI search is enormous. That gap is exactly where the opportunity is.
What to do this week
Three things, in order of effort:
Set up Bing Webmaster Tools (10 minutes). It’s free, at webmaster.bing.com. Submit your sitemap there the same way you would in Google Search Console; if you’re already in Google Search Console, Bing will offer to import your data from there. Take it up on that offer.
Enable IndexNow. IndexNow is a protocol supported by Bing that lets you notify search engines in real time when you publish new content — instead of waiting for a crawler to find your new page, you’re telling it yourself. Most major CMS platforms (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace) have plugins or built-in support for it. This is five minutes once you’re in Bing Webmaster Tools.
Check your Bing presence. Do a site search on Bing (type site:yourdomain.com into the search bar) and see how many of your pages are indexed. Compare that to what you see in Google Search Console. If the gap is significant — and for most Canadian SMBs who’ve never submitted a Bing sitemap, it will be — IndexNow is your fastest fix.
Bonus: Submit your URL to Brave Search. Claude uses Brave Search’s index, and Brave offers a Manual URL Submission Tool for sites and pages you want crawled. Unlike Bing’s IndexNow protocol, Brave doesn’t have an equivalent real-time notification system — you submit individual URLs and the crawl typically takes 1 to 3 days. Worth doing for your homepage and key service pages. (Full disclosure: I’ve submitted my homepage here and the rest is on the to-do list.)
Bonus: Audit your directory listings. Your own website isn’t the only thing Bing indexes. Third-party directories — Digital Reference, Clutch, Alignable — are crawled and indexed too, and being consistently listed with your correct name, category, and location creates additional entity signals across multiple sources. If you’re not already on these, sign up. If you are, verify the information is current and consistent with what your own website says.
What this doesn’t solve
Making sure Bing knows you exist is the baseline. It’s a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
Even if your pages are fully indexed on Bing, AI models still need content that’s structured clearly enough to cite. A page that’s in the index but organized around vague headings and inconsistent naming won’t get pulled into an answer any more reliably than a page that isn’t indexed at all. The indexing step gets you into the pool; the content structure is what gets you cited.
That’s a different conversation — about how to write content that AI models can actually use, how entity naming works, and what structured data can do for your visibility across every platform that indexes you. It’s also a longer one, and it’s covered in full in this post on AI search visibility.
But the Bing setup? Do that first. It’s free, it takes ten minutes, and most of your competitors haven’t done it yet.
If you want to talk through what AI search visibility looks like for your specific business, book a 30-minute coffee meeting.