Bing rank tracking is a smaller, stranger problem than Google rank tracking, and it got structurally harder in 2025 in a way that most articles on the subject have not caught up with.
We are Geonode, we sell proxies, and the honest disclaimer goes first: if you want to know how your own site ranks on Bing, the best tool is free, official, and has nothing to do with us. The Bing Webmaster Tools API reports your actual average position from real impressions, costs nothing, and is more accurate than any scraper because it is measuring what happened rather than simulating it. A large share of the people searching for a Bing rank tracker should set one up and stop there. We will explain how, and only then discuss the cases where you need something else.
The thing that changed: on 11 August 2025 Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs. The documentation for the Bing Web Search API is now archived and explicitly marked as retired, and Microsoft directs customers to Grounding with Bing Search within Azure AI Agents instead — which is a different product doing a different job. It supplies web context to a language model that then writes an answer. It does not hand you a ranked list of results.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: there is no longer an official, supported way to programmatically retrieve Bing search results as structured data. Every commercial Bing rank tracker now sits on scraping, whether it says so or not, and that changes the reliability and legal picture for the whole category.
One more number for context, from StatCounter: as of August 2026, Bing holds about 4.5% of worldwide search against Google's 91.1%. Whether that justifies a tracking budget is a real question, and there is a section below that argues both sides honestly.
What Changed in August 2025
The detail matters, because it explains why the tooling landscape looks the way it does.
The Retirement
Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025. The affected products included the Bing Web Search tiers and Bing Custom Search. Existing instances were decommissioned and new sign-ups closed. Microsoft's own documentation page for the Bing Web Search API now carries archived and retired flags and has been moved into its previous-versions archive.
This was not a price change or a deprecation warning. The product stopped existing.
What Replaced It, and Why It Is Not a Replacement
Microsoft points customers toward Grounding with Bing Search, part of Azure AI Agents. It allows an agent to incorporate real-time public web data when generating a response with a language model.
Read that carefully against what a rank tracker needs. The old API returned structured search results to an application — positions, URLs, titles, in order. The new product gives web-derived context to a model, which then writes prose. You cannot reliably reconstruct a ranked results page from a generated answer, and you certainly cannot do it consistently enough to track position changes over time.
For a chatbot that needs current information, this is a sensible product. For anyone who wanted to know what sits at position four, it is not the same thing at all.
What This Means for the Tools
Every commercial Bing rank tracker and every SERP API offering Bing coverage is now obtaining that data by fetching and parsing Bing's results pages. That was true of many of them before; it is true of all of them now.
Three consequences follow.
Reliability depends on parser maintenance. No contract, no stability guarantee, no deprecation notice when the page changes. When Bing alters its layout, tools break, and the good ones fix it quickly.
The legal and terms position is less comfortable than using a paid official API. Automated querying is generally contrary to search engines' terms of service. That was already the practical reality for Google, where no equivalent official product ever existed; Bing has now joined it.
Pricing lost its anchor. With no official rate to compare against, providers price Bing as a variant of their general SERP product, and Bing tends to be treated as a second-class engine — parsed less thoroughly, tested less often, fixed more slowly.
Which is a good argument for using the free official option wherever it can answer your question.
Start With the Free Official Option
This is the section we would most like people to act on, and it costs nothing.
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's equivalent of Google Search Console: a free service reporting how your verified sites perform in Bing search. It has a documented API, and that API is the most accurate Bing ranking data available to anyone.
Why It Beats Scraping
A rank tracker sends a synthetic query from a synthetic location and records what came back. That is a simulation of one hypothetical searcher.
Webmaster Tools reports what actually happened to real users. When it says your average impression position was 17, that is the mean position across every genuine impression your page received. There is no location assumption, no personalisation guesswork, no question of whether the check was representative.
For the question "where does my site rank on Bing", the official data is not merely cheaper. It is better, and it is better for a structural reason that no amount of scraping engineering can overcome.
Getting Access
Microsoft documents two routes: OAuth 2.0, which it recommends, and an API key.
The API key path is straightforward. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools — you can use a Microsoft, Google or Facebook identity. Add and verify the site you want data for. Open Settings, go to API Access, accept the terms, and generate a key.
One useful detail from the documentation: the key is generated per user, not per site, so a single key covers every site you have verified. For an agency with many client properties verified under one account, that is one credential rather than dozens.
Microsoft's documentation includes the obvious but worthwhile warning not to share the key, and instructions for deleting and regenerating it if it is compromised — noting that every application using the old key will stop working when you do.
The Limits, Stated Plainly
It only covers sites you have verified. You cannot see competitors. You cannot see queries you do not already appear for. And per Microsoft's documentation, the data is updated weekly, so it is not a same-day feedback loop.
If those limits are acceptable — and for a great many teams they are — you have finished, at no cost.
What the Webmaster Tools API Actually Returns
Worth being concrete, because the field names tell you what you can and cannot do.
The GetQueryStats endpoint returns detailed traffic statistics for your top queries. A single record looks like this:
{
"Query": "query",
"Impressions": 100,
"Clicks": 15,
"AvgImpressionPosition": 17,
"AvgClickPosition": 18,
"Date": "2011-09-16T00:00:00-07:00"
}
Both XML and JSON are supported, over a plain HTTP GET with your key as a query parameter. There is no SDK requirement and no complicated authentication flow if you use the key method.
Reading the Two Position Fields
The pair is more interesting than a single position figure, and this distinction does not exist in most tools.
AvgImpressionPosition is the average position at which your page was shown. This is the conventional ranking number.
AvgClickPosition is the average position at which your page was actually clicked.
Comparing them is genuinely informative. If your impression position is 17 and your click position is 18, clicks are coming from roughly where you rank. If the click position is markedly better than the impression position, you are being clicked disproportionately when you appear high — which usually means the listing itself is working and the problem is visibility. If it is markedly worse, you are getting clicks from unusually deep positions, which often means strong intent match on a query you rank poorly for.
That is a diagnostic signal a scraper cannot produce at all, because a scraper does not observe clicks.
Practical Use
A short scheduled job that calls GetQueryStats for each verified site and appends rows to a database gives you a full ranking history with impressions and clicks attached, for free, indefinitely. Given the data refreshes weekly, a weekly job is sufficient — running it daily produces duplicates rather than resolution.
Other endpoints in the same API cover crawl statistics, indexed pages, links and URL submission, so the same credential supports a broader monitoring setup than rankings alone.
The Paid Options Compared
If you need competitor positions, keywords you do not yet rank for, or specific locations, you need something that fetches results pages. Two categories, as with Google.
SERP APIs fetch and parse a live results page and return JSON. You own the scheduling, storage and history. Rank trackers store your keywords, check them on a schedule, keep the history and give you a dashboard, with an API for exporting.
Pricing below is from each provider's own pricing page at the time of writing and covers their general SERP product. Bing support varies and Bing-specific rates may differ — check each provider's engine list before committing.
| Tool | Type | Rate | Notes for Bing |
|---|
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Official | Free | Your verified sites only; weekly refresh |
| DataForSEO | SERP API | $0.60/1K queued, $2/1K live | Cheapest at batch volume |
| Oxylabs | SERP API | from $0.50/1K | $49/mo entry; rate varies by target |
| Bright Data | SERP API | $1.50/1K PAYG | 5,000 records/mo free; multiple engines |
| SerpApi | SERP API | $25/1K entry, to $5.50/1K | Best documentation; most expensive per unit |
| Rank trackers (various) | Dashboard | Per keyword | Bing often costs a separate keyword slot |
Reading the Table
The free official option is not in the same category as the others, and that is the point. It answers a narrower question better and at no cost. Rule it out before paying for anything.
DataForSEO's queued mode remains the cheapest credible route at volume, at roughly a third the price of its live mode. If your Bing checks run overnight, there is no reason to pay the live premium.
Bright Data's free tier is the most generous for testing — 5,000 records a month is enough to track a modest Bing keyword set indefinitely without paying anything at all.
SerpApi costs several times more per request and buys you the cleanest developer experience in the category. At Bing volumes, which are usually small, that premium may be entirely affordable in absolute terms even though it looks indefensible per unit.
Rank trackers commonly charge Bing as a separate engine, meaning a keyword tracked on both Google and Bing consumes two slots. Check this before assuming your existing plan covers it — it is the most common billing surprise in this specific niche.
The Caveat That Applies to All of Them
Since the official API's retirement, every one of these obtains Bing data by fetching and parsing results pages. Ask any vendor how quickly they repair Bing parsers specifically, because Bing is a minority engine for all of them and gets proportionally less attention. A tool that silently returns stale or partial Bing data looks identical to one that is working.
What to Evaluate for Bing Specifically
Bing is not Google with a different logo, and the differences matter for tracking.
Does the tool actually parse Bing's own features? Bing's results page has its own arrangement of ads, answer panels, image and video blocks, and AI-generated summaries. A parser that models Google's layout and applies it loosely to Bing will drop features and shift every organic position beneath them. Check a handful of results by hand against what you see in a browser.
Location handling. Bing's localisation behaves differently from Google's and its market parameters are its own. If your work is geographic, verify that the tool's location targeting produces what you would see from that location, rather than trusting that it works because it works for Google.
Refresh honesty. Ask how often Bing data is genuinely refreshed rather than how often the dashboard updates. Because Bing is a minority engine, some tools check it far less often than Google and present the results identically.
Parser maintenance record. With no official API to fall back on, this is the single most important operational property and the hardest to assess from outside. The proxy is how quickly they respond when you report something wrong.
Whether Bing costs extra. Covered above, and worth confirming in writing.
Coverage of the AI surfaces. Bing's index underpins Microsoft's AI answer experiences — Microsoft's own recommended replacement for the retired API is literally a product for grounding language models in Bing web data. Classic rank position is an increasingly incomplete description of visibility on Microsoft's surfaces, and no tool models this well yet. Treat any vendor claiming otherwise with scepticism.
The Test
Same as for any engine, and it takes an afternoon. Take twenty of your real keywords. Run them through two candidate tools on the same morning. Check the results against what you see in a private browser window with your location set appropriately. Count how many positions match and how many SERP features were parsed correctly.
For Bing in particular, do this before subscribing rather than after. The variance between tools is wider than it is for Google, precisely because it gets less attention.
Cost Modelling for a Bing Keyword Set
Bing keyword sets are usually smaller than Google ones, which changes the arithmetic considerably.
Scenario: 200 keywords, 1 location, checked weekly. That is 200 checks a week, or roughly 870 a month.
| Option | How it prices out | Monthly |
|---|
| Bing Webmaster Tools | Free, your sites only | $0 |
| Bright Data | 870 within the 5,000 free tier | Free |
| DataForSEO (queued) | 870 × $0.0006 | ~$0.52 (account minimum applies) |
| Oxylabs Micro | $49 plan, almost entirely unused | $49 |
| SerpApi Starter | 870 within 1,000 searches | $25 |
At this volume, the free tiers cover the entire job. Bright Data's 5,000 monthly records absorb it with room to spare, and DataForSEO's usage cost is under a dollar — though its account minimum means you pre-fund rather than pay pennies.
Scale It Up
Now make it 500 keywords across 3 locations, checked daily — 45,000 checks a month, the same workload as our Google example.
DataForSEO queued lands around $27. Bright Data pay-as-you-go around $68. SerpApi requires a plan around $725. The spread is the same order of magnitude as for Google, because it is the same infrastructure.
But stop and ask whether that workload is justified for an engine holding about 4.5% of search. Tracking 500 Bing keywords daily costs the same as tracking 500 Google keywords daily while addressing roughly a twentieth of the traffic opportunity. Occasionally that is right — some audiences genuinely skew toward Microsoft's surfaces. Usually it is a dashboard row that nobody acts on.
The Two Levers
Cadence. Bing positions generally move less than Google's, and Bing's own Webmaster Tools data refreshes weekly. Daily checking gives you resolution that the underlying reality does not support. Weekly is defensible; daily rarely is.
Keyword count. Track the terms where Bing traffic actually converts, not a mirror of your Google list. Look at your analytics for which queries bring Bing users who do something, and track those. This commonly reduces the list by an order of magnitude with no loss of anything useful.
Where Proxies Fit and Where They Do Not
Our product, so weigh it accordingly — and the honest answer is that for most Bing rank tracking, it does not fit at all.
Where It Does Not
If you are using a managed SERP API, the provider handles addresses, sessions and challenges. That is most of what you are paying them for, and adding your own proxies changes nothing.
If you are using Bing Webmaster Tools, you are calling an authenticated official API for your own data. There is nothing to route around.
If your keyword set is small. A few hundred checks a week from one address is not a volume that triggers anything. Buying infrastructure for it solves a problem you do not have.
That covers the large majority of people who arrive at this topic.
Where It Does
Building your own tracker at volume. Past a certain scale the per-request economics of managed APIs stop making sense, and the proxy layer plus your own parsers becomes cheaper. That threshold is high — typically millions of checks a month — and it is rarely reached by Bing work alone.
Location precision the APIs do not offer. If you need results as seen from a specific city or region that your tool covers thinly, residential addresses in that location are the only route. This is a real gap and the strongest argument for proxies in this workflow.
You are already scraping at scale. If the proxy layer, parsers and monitoring already exist for other work, adding Bing is a marginal cost rather than a new system, and building is straightforwardly sensible.
For reference, our residential proxies run from $0.79/GB with 1 TB free for new accounts, and datacenter from $0.14/GB (pricing). For Bing specifically, we would expect most readers of this article never to need either — the free Webmaster Tools API or a free SERP API tier covers a typical Bing keyword set completely.
The Part That Applies Whatever You Use
Automated querying of a search engine is generally against its terms of service, and that has been true throughout — the API retirement did not create the issue, it removed the sanctioned alternative. Proxies change what the engine observes; they do not change what you agreed to. If this matters in your context, take advice rather than a blog post's word for it.
When Tracking Bing Is Not Worth It
The section arguing against the article's premise, which in this case is unusually strong.
Bing is about 4.5% of worldwide search. Google is 91.1%. If your Bing tracking budget and attention are anywhere near proportional to your Google tracking, the allocation is wrong by roughly a factor of twenty.
Your analytics show negligible Bing traffic. Check before you track. If Bing sends you 1% of visits and those visits behave like everyone else's, there is nothing here to manage. Tracking generates a number; it does not generate traffic.
You do nothing differently for Bing. Almost nobody optimises separately for Bing, because the fundamentals overlap heavily and improvements on one generally carry to the other. If the number never changes a decision, the tracking is decoration.
You only need your own site's positions and Webmaster Tools covers it. Free, official, more accurate. Stop there.
You are paying per keyword for a second engine. Doubling your rank tracking bill to add an engine worth a twentieth of the traffic is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by default when the checkbox appeared.
When It Genuinely Is Worth It
Your audience skews to Microsoft's ecosystem. Enterprise software, IT procurement, corporate environments where Edge and Windows defaults do real work. Bing's share in these segments can be far above the global average, and if your analytics show it, track it.
Bing traffic converts disproportionately well. It sometimes does, and a channel with a low volume and a high conversion rate deserves attention out of proportion to its size. Your own data will tell you.
You compete in a market where Bing's share is materially higher. Geographic and demographic variation is substantial.
You care about AI answer surfaces. Microsoft's assistant products are grounded in Bing's index — that is precisely what the replacement product for the retired API does. Being findable in Bing is increasingly a proxy for being citable in Microsoft's AI answers, and that argument for paying attention to Bing is stronger now than the raw 4.5% suggests.
The honest summary: track Bing if your own analytics justify it, at a cadence and keyword count proportional to what it actually delivers. Mirroring your Google setup is the mistake.
People Also Ask
Is there an official Bing rank tracking API?
Not for general search results. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025 and the documentation is now archived as retired. For your own verified sites, the free Bing Webmaster Tools API remains available and reports actual average position from real impressions.
What replaced the Bing Search API?
Microsoft directs customers to Grounding with Bing Search within Azure AI Agents, which supplies live web data to a language model that then generates an answer. It is not a substitute for structured search results and cannot reliably be used to determine ranking positions.
How do I check my Bing ranking for free?
Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and use its API. GetQueryStats returns your queries with impressions, clicks, average impression position and average click position. Generate an API key under Settings, API Access — one key covers every site you have verified.
How accurate are Bing rank trackers?
They report what a synthetic check from a synthetic location saw at one moment. Webmaster Tools reports what really happened to real users, which is more accurate for your own site by construction. For competitor positions, a tracker is the only option, and accuracy varies more between tools on Bing than on Google.
Do rank trackers charge extra for Bing?
Frequently, yes — many treat each engine as a separate keyword slot, so a term tracked on both Google and Bing consumes two. Confirm this before assuming your current plan covers it.
How often should I check Bing rankings?
Weekly is usually sufficient. Bing positions tend to move less than Google's, and Bing's own Webmaster Tools data refreshes weekly, so daily checking adds cost without adding real resolution.
Is Bing worth tracking at all?
Only if your analytics say so. Bing is around 4.5% of worldwide search, but its share is much higher in some enterprise and regional segments, and its index underpins Microsoft's AI answer products. Check your own Bing traffic and its conversion behaviour first, then decide.
Do I need proxies to track Bing rankings?
Almost certainly not. A managed SERP API handles that layer for you, and Webmaster Tools is an authenticated official API. Proxies become relevant only if you build your own tracker at large volume or need location precision the tools do not offer.
Wrapping Up
The most important fact about Bing rank tracking in 2026 is one that most guides have not absorbed: the official Bing Search API is gone. Microsoft retired it on 11 August 2025 and the recommended replacement grounds language models in web data rather than returning ranked results. Every commercial Bing rank tracker now depends on fetching and parsing results pages, which makes parser maintenance the property that actually distinguishes them — and Bing, as a minority engine, gets less of that attention everywhere.
The second most important fact is that a free, official, more accurate option still exists for the most common question. If you want to know how your own site ranks on Bing, verify it in Webmaster Tools and call GetQueryStats. It returns impressions, clicks, average impression position and average click position from real user activity, updated weekly, at no cost. The comparison between those two position fields is a diagnostic no scraper can produce, and almost nobody uses it.
Pay for a tool when you genuinely need what the free option cannot give: competitor positions, keywords you do not yet rank for, or specific locations. At typical Bing volumes the free tiers of the paid tools frequently cover the whole job — Bright Data's 5,000 monthly records absorb 200 keywords checked weekly with room to spare.
And size the effort to the channel. Bing is roughly 4.5% of worldwide search, so mirroring your Google keyword list and cadence is almost certainly wrong. Track the terms where your analytics show Bing traffic actually doing something, check them weekly rather than daily, and give the saved budget to the engine sending nine tenths of your visitors.
We sell proxies and the honest conclusion is that most people reading this need neither ours nor anyone's. Set up the free official API first. Buy something only when you have found the specific question it cannot answer.
