Bing Places: The Free Listing 9 in 10 Competitors Miss

Bing's Real Reach in Australia: Bigger Than the 4% Headline

Bing holds approximately 4–6% of Australian desktop search volume, according to StatCounter data for 2025–2026. Dismiss that as trivial and you're ignoring tens of millions of monthly searches — most of which return local business results to users whose browsers default to Bing because they're running Microsoft Edge on a work laptop and simply never changed the setting. That is your customer.

The more compelling number for 2026 is this: Microsoft Copilot — the AI assistant embedded in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Edge — uses Bing as its primary data source when answering local business queries. When someone asks Copilot "find me a licensed electrician near Parramatta" or "best café open Sunday near Central Station", it pulls from Bing Places listings. A business without a Bing Places listing is invisible to that assistant — and Copilot ships on every Windows PC sold in Australia today.

Compound that with DuckDuckGo (which sources a significant share of its local results from Bing's index), Yahoo Search Australia, and Bing Maps embedded across thousands of third-party websites, and the real footprint of a Bing Places listing is meaningfully larger than the raw search-share figure suggests. The listing itself is free. Setup takes 10–15 minutes. The vast majority of your local competitors have never claimed theirs. That is either a problem or an opportunity, depending on which side of it you are on.

What Bing Places for Business Actually Is

Bing Places for Business is Microsoft's free local business listing platform — the Bing equivalent of Google Business Profile. A claimed and verified listing appears in Bing's local search results, Bing Maps, Microsoft Copilot responses, and a network of apps and services that use Bing data as a backend. You control how your business appears: name, address, phone number, website URL, trading hours, category, photos, and a short description.

Bing syndicates its local business data to a range of other properties — including third-party mapping apps and navigation services — which extends your listing's reach beyond what you can directly measure in a browser. Bing Places also aggregates customer reviews from TripAdvisor and Facebook alongside direct Bing reviews, which means your existing presence on those platforms already feeds into your Bing profile from day one.

Bing Places is separate from Bing Webmaster Tools, which manages your website's organic presence in Bing's search index. Both are worth setting up if you have a website, but this guide focuses on the Places listing that controls your local business profile.

Who Actually Uses Bing in Australia? The Demographics Should Inform Your Decision

Understanding who searches on Bing shapes how you evaluate this platform's value for your specific type of business. Bing users in Australia skew measurably different from the average Google user:

• Older adults (45–70+): Bing is the default search engine on Windows machines, and Australians in this age bracket are significantly less likely to change browser or search engine settings. This demographic also tends to have higher household income and greater discretionary spend — they are the customer many professional service businesses are actively trying to reach.
• Corporate and government employees: Enterprise Windows environments — law firms, hospitals, council offices, accounting practices, commercial construction companies — frequently keep Bing as the default on work machines due to group policy settings. If your customers are businesses or professionals, your Bing exposure may be higher than the national average suggests.
• Microsoft Edge users: Edge ships as the default browser on every new Windows 11 PC. Most users never change it. Searches originating in Edge default to Bing.
• Microsoft Copilot users: As of 2026, Copilot is embedded in Microsoft 365 subscriptions used by millions of Australian businesses. Employees increasingly use Copilot for quick lookups — including local service provider searches — all of which draw from Bing data.

The practical implication: if you run a financial advisory practice, a legal firm, an accounting practice, a medical clinic, or a trades business targeting commercial clients, your Bing market share is likely higher than the national average. A licensed electrician in Sydney doing commercial work, for example, is regularly sought by property managers and facility managers searching from a corporate Windows desktop — and those searchers are disproportionately on Bing.

How to Set Up Bing Places for Business in Australia: Step by Step

The fastest path — if you already have a verified Google Business Profile — takes under 10 minutes. Starting from scratch, allow 15–20 minutes for the initial setup plus up to 24 hours for verification to complete.

Step 1: Navigate to Bing Places

Go to bingplaces.com in any browser. You will see a clear "Get Started" prompt on the landing page.

Step 2: Sign In With a Microsoft Account

You need a Microsoft account to claim a Bing Places listing — the same account you would use for Outlook, OneDrive, or Microsoft 365. If you do not have one, creating a free account at account.microsoft.com takes under two minutes. You can use any existing email address; it does not need to be an Outlook or Hotmail address.

Step 3: Import From Google Business Profile (Strongly Recommended)

On the Bing Places dashboard, look for the Import from Google option. This is the fastest and most accurate setup method if you already have a verified Google listing. You will be prompted to sign in to your Google account, grant Bing read access to your Business Profile data, and Bing pre-populates your listing — name, address, phone, website, hours, categories, and photos — automatically.

The import is one-directional and one-time: it does not affect your Google listing in any way, and future changes to either platform must be managed independently. If you do not yet have a Google Business Profile, set one up first — it is the higher-priority platform for most Australian businesses — then return here to import.

Step 4: Search for Your Existing Business

Whether importing or creating manually, Bing prompts you to search for your business by name and location. This checks whether Bing has already auto-generated a listing from its web crawl. Finding and claiming an existing auto-listing is faster than building from scratch and preserves any data Bing has already indexed about you.

Step 5: Claim or Create Your Listing

If Bing finds a matching listing, select it and click "Claim". If nothing comes up, click "Add your business" to create a new listing. For manual creation, complete every field:

• Business name — exactly as it appears on your website and Google listing
• Physical address, or "service area" if you operate without a fixed public-facing location (mobile trades, cleaners, mobile pet groomers)
• Phone number — in the same format you use everywhere else
• Website URL — your homepage, not a social media page
• Business category — choose the most specific option available
• Trading hours
• Business description — up to 250 characters

Step 6: Verify Your Business

Verification confirms to Bing that you are the legitimate owner or manager of the listed business. Australian businesses can verify by:

• Phone PIN: Bing calls or texts your business phone number with a short code. This is the fastest method — typically complete in under two minutes.
• Email: A verification code is sent to a business domain email address. Usually completes within a few hours.
• Manual review: For some businesses with no existing web presence, Bing may review the listing manually. Allow up to five business days.

If you imported from a verified Google Business Profile, verification is often expedited — Bing recognises Google's prior verification in many cases and reduces its own vetting burden accordingly.

Step 7: Complete and Enrich Your Profile

Once verified, return to your dashboard and fill in every available field. Fields left blank reduce your listing's completeness score, which directly affects how prominently Bing surfaces you in local results.

• Photos: Add at least five — a cover image, interior, exterior, team photo, and a service or product shot. Listings with photos consistently outperform text-only profiles in both ranking and click-through rate.
• Additional categories: You can list multiple categories. Add all that accurately describe your business, with the primary category as your most specific and accurate match.
• Services or menu items: Where your category supports it, list your key services or products. This helps Bing match your listing to specific service queries rather than just name or category searches.
• Special hours: Add public holiday hours before the holidays, not after. Stale or missing hours create customer friction and signal poor listing hygiene to Bing's algorithm.
• Business attributes: Mark relevant attributes (wheelchair accessible, EFTPOS available, outdoor seating, 24-hour service) where they are available for your category.

Step 8: Monitor Your Dashboard Regularly

Bing Places provides analytics covering search impressions, clicks to your website, and calls initiated from your listing. Check these at least quarterly. While Bing's analytics are less detailed than Google's Business Profile Insights, they confirm whether the listing is generating activity. For a more granular view of how your business ranks in Bing's organic results across specific keywords, tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can track Bing local keyword positions alongside Google data — though their Bing coverage is less comprehensive than their Google tracking.

Optimising Your Bing Places Listing: What Actually Moves Rankings

NAP Consistency Across Every Platform

NAP — Name, Address, Phone number — must be identical across your Bing listing, your Google Business Profile, your website, and every directory you appear on. Even minor formatting differences ("St" versus "Street", "Level 1" versus "L1", "Pty Ltd" versus "P/L") create conflicting data signals that dilute your local authority on both Bing and Google. Choose one canonical format and apply it everywhere, starting with your website's contact page and footer.

Write a Description That Answers the Query

The description field (250 characters) is short. Do not waste it on filler like "Welcome to our business, proudly serving the community since 2009." Write one precise sentence naming what you do, where you do it, and who you serve: "Licensed commercial and residential electricians across Sydney's inner west — same-week bookings, upfront quotes." That sentence directly matches the queries you want to appear for.

Choose the Right Primary Category

Bing's category system broadly mirrors Google's local business taxonomy. Choose the single most specific category for your primary trade or service. A hair salon should select "Hair Salon" rather than the broader "Beauty Salon" if the specific option exists. Specificity improves relevance scoring for category-matched queries and reduces the pool of competitors you are ranked against.

Reviews and Responses Both Matter

Bing Places aggregates reviews from TripAdvisor and Facebook alongside direct Bing reviews, so your existing review presence on those platforms feeds immediately into your Bing profile without any additional action. More reviews with higher ratings improve your position in Bing's local results pack. Respond to every review via the Bing Places dashboard — owner engagement is a ranking signal Bing explicitly weighs, and a considered response to a negative review publicly demonstrates professionalism to every future visitor who reads it.

Bing Places vs Google Business Profile: An Honest Side-by-Side

The verdict: Google Business Profile is the higher-priority platform and delivers the greater volume of local traffic for most Australian businesses. But Bing Places is a free, 15-minute task that extends your reach into a segment of the market your competitors have almost certainly ignored. There is no sensible argument for skipping it.

The Copilot Effect: Why 2026 Changes the Bing Places Calculus

This is the insight most articles about Bing Places written before 2024 miss entirely. Microsoft Copilot has materially changed the value of a Bing Places listing in a way that deserves specific attention from any Australian business owner making this decision today.

As of 2026, Microsoft Copilot is embedded across the full Microsoft ecosystem:

• Windows 11 — a dedicated Copilot key on the keyboard of many new Windows PCs and a taskbar button on all
• Microsoft 365 — integrated into Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, used by the majority of Australian businesses
• Microsoft Edge — Copilot lives in the browser sidebar, one click away during any search session
• Bing.com — the AI-powered conversational search experience that responds to local business queries directly

When a user asks Copilot a local business question — "find a licensed plumber near Parramatta available this week", "what's a good café near Central Station open Sunday", "which accountants in Ballarat specialise in small business tax" — Copilot draws from Bing Places data to generate its response. Businesses with complete, verified Bing Places listings have a material advantage in appearing in those answers. Businesses with no listing are simply absent from the conversation.

This is not a hypothetical future scenario. The Australian government and most large Australian corporations operate on Microsoft 365. Enterprise-scale Copilot rollouts have been underway since 2024. The professional who needs a service provider and asks Copilot from their work machine is a real customer with real spend — and if your business is not on Bing Places, that customer cannot find you via Copilot regardless of how well-optimised your Google presence is.

The parallel to early Google Maps is instructive. The businesses that claimed their Google Places listings in 2009–2011 — when most small businesses did not bother — accumulated review counts and local authority that competitors spent years trying to match. Bing Places combined with Copilot integration is a smaller version of that same window. It is open now, and most of your competitors have not walked through it.

Bing Places and Your Website: The Link That Makes Both Work

A Bing Places listing without a functional, professional website attached to it is a half-finished strategy. When a Bing user clicks your listing and arrives at a website that is slow, visually outdated, or difficult to navigate on a phone screen, the listing has done its job — and the website has undone it.

Bing's local ranking algorithm considers the website linked to your listing as a quality signal. A site that loads quickly, uses HTTPS, is mobile-responsive, and contains clear, relevant content — service pages, a visible location, a contact number — supports your Bing Places ranking. A website that fails any of those tests weakens it. The same signals matter for Google, so the effort compounds rather than duplicates across both platforms.

For businesses running local search across both platforms, the effective foundation is: a claimed Bing Places listing, a verified Google Business Profile, consistent NAP data across Australian directories, and a professional website that converts the traffic those listings deliver. Whether you engage a specialist for the ongoing work — through a local SEO retainer or a website care plan to keep your site technically current — all four elements need to be in place before optimising any individual one of them.

Where Bing Places Fits in Your Broader Australian Directory Strategy

Bing Places is one of three tier-one local listings every Australian business should claim. The other two are Google Business Profile and Apple Maps Connect. Beyond those three, consistent listings on the following platforms build the citation footprint that reinforces your local search authority across all search engines:

• True Local — well-indexed by both Google and Bing, widely used in Australian local search
• Yellow Pages Australia (yellowpages.com.au) — still actively indexed and trusted, particularly by older demographics
• Hotfrog Australia — free, regularly crawled, useful for citation building
• White Pages Australia — a trusted NAP reference point for search engine data aggregators
• Industry-specific directories — HiPages for trades, HealthEngine for healthcare, TripAdvisor and Zomato for hospitality

For hospitality businesses — cafés, restaurants, and catering operations like those supplied by ZenPacks Australia — TripAdvisor and Zomato carry additional weight because both platforms feed directly into Bing Maps' hospitality category results. A strong TripAdvisor profile reinforces your Bing Maps presence even without any direct action on Bing Places itself.

The principle that ties all of this together: consistent NAP data everywhere. One inconsistency — a different phone number format on True Local, an old address on Yellow Pages — cascades into weaker rankings across every platform. Audit your existing listings for consistency before you start adding new ones.

Common Mistakes Australian Businesses Make With Bing Places

Claiming but not completing verification. An unverified Bing Places listing has almost no ranking weight. If you started the process and stopped before entering your verification PIN or clicking the email confirmation link, your listing is live but dormant. Log back in and finish it.

Setting it up and forgetting it. A listing with trading hours that have not been updated since 2022, no photos, and a string of unanswered reviews signals to Bing — and to every potential customer who views it — that the business is inattentive. Check and update your Bing Places dashboard at least once per quarter.

Using a personal Microsoft account. While Bing Places technically works with any Microsoft account, use a business email-linked Microsoft account — via your Microsoft 365 subscription if you have one — to keep business listings separate from personal accounts and ensure continuity if staff or ownership changes.

Inconsistent NAP with your Google listing. If your Bing listing shows "Shop 3, 45 Main St" and your Google listing shows "Suite 3/45 Main Street", that is a data conflict that weakens both. Pick one canonical address format and apply it consistently across every platform, starting with your own website.

Not checking the mobile view. A significant share of Bing searches happen on mobile via Edge for Android and on Windows tablets. After completing your setup, pull up your listing on a phone screen — not just in a desktop browser — to verify that photos display correctly and that contact information is tappable rather than just visible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bing Places for Business free in Australia?

Yes, completely free. There is no cost to claim, verify, or maintain a Bing Places listing in Australia. Microsoft generates revenue through its paid advertising platform (Microsoft Advertising, formerly Bing Ads), but the local business profile — your Places listing — has always been free, with no premium tiers or paid upgrades available for the organic listing itself.

How long does Bing Places verification take?

Phone PIN verification is typically complete in under two minutes — Bing sends a short code to your business number immediately upon request. Email verification usually arrives within a few hours. Manual review, triggered for some businesses that have no existing web presence, can take up to five business days. Businesses that import from a verified Google Business Profile often move through verification faster, as Google's prior verification reduces Bing's own vetting requirements.

Can I import my Google Business Profile to Bing Places?

Yes. Bing Places has a built-in Google import feature that authenticates with your Google account and pulls your business data across — name, address, phone, website, hours, categories, and photos — in a single step. This is the recommended setup path if you have an existing, verified Google Business Profile. The import is one-directional and one-time: changes made to your Google listing after the import will not automatically appear in Bing. The two platforms are managed independently from that point forward.

Does having a Bing Places listing affect my Google rankings?

Not directly — Bing and Google are separate ranking systems. However, a verified Bing Places listing contributes to your local citation footprint: the consistency and volume of your business's NAP data across the web. A well-maintained Bing listing adds to the citation signals that Google also weighs when ranking local businesses in its own results. The relationship is indirect but real, and it compounds with other directory listings over time.

Do Australian customers actually use Bing enough to justify the setup?

Bing holds approximately 4–6% of Australian desktop search volume — tens of millions of monthly queries. When you factor in DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing's index for many results), Yahoo Australia, and Microsoft Copilot responses drawing from Bing Places data, the effective reach is larger than the raw search-share figure. For business types that skew toward older, corporate, or professional demographics — the precise audience that over-indexes on Bing — the platform's share of relevant searches can be considerably higher than the national average. Setup takes 15 minutes and costs nothing; the opportunity cost of skipping it is real, the cost of claiming it is not.

How do I get reviews on my Bing Places listing?

Bing Places aggregates reviews from TripAdvisor and Facebook, so your existing presence on those platforms already feeds into your Bing profile without any additional action on your part. For direct Bing reviews, share a link to your Bing Places listing with customers after a positive experience — find your direct listing URL in the Bing Places dashboard. Respond to all reviews, positive and negative, through the dashboard. Bing's algorithm weighs owner engagement as a ranking signal, and a considered public response to a negative review demonstrates professionalism to every future visitor who reads the thread.

What is the difference between Bing Places and Bing Webmaster Tools?

They are separate platforms with different purposes. Bing Places (bingplaces.com) manages your local business listing — the profile card that appears in Bing's local search results and Bing Maps. Bing Webmaster Tools (webmaster.bing.com) manages your website's organic presence in Bing's search index — sitemap submission, crawl monitoring, and organic keyword performance data. Both use the same Microsoft account login but are independent products. If you have a website, set up both. If your business has no website yet, start with Bing Places and prioritise getting a professional website built — it is the asset that makes every listing work harder.

Should I also run paid ads on Bing alongside my free listing?

A Bing Places listing is an organic (unpaid) listing. Microsoft Advertising is the separate paid platform. For most Australian small businesses, the sensible priority order is: (1) claimed and optimised Bing Places listing — free and immediate, (2) verified Google Business Profile — free and highest-impact, (3) a professional website that converts listing traffic into enquiries, (4) Google Ads if budget and margins support it. Bing advertising is worth evaluating for businesses whose customer demographics over-index on Bing — corporate B2B, professional services, clients aged 45 and above — but it is not a prerequisite for making full use of your free organic listing.

The Verdict on Bing Places for Australian Businesses

Bing Places is worth setting up: it is free, it takes 15 minutes, it feeds Microsoft Copilot's AI responses on hundreds of millions of Windows devices, and the vast majority of your local competitors have never done it. Claim the listing, complete every field, verify, add photos, and check it quarterly — that is the full ongoing commitment. When your business is ready for the professional website that makes every listing actually convert enquiries into paying customers, weauto builds them for $99 + GST, live in five business days.

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