Bing has been the punchline of search engine jokes for fifteen years. I've told a few of them. For most of that time, telling a local business owner to go claim their Bing listing would have been a waste of an afternoon — the traffic wasn't there, and everyone knew it.

That advice is now out of date, and not because Bing got popular. It's because of who's reading it. When someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in Birmingham, the answer doesn't come from nowhere — it gets assembled from an underlying web index, and for a big share of AI assistants that index is Microsoft's. Bing Places for business went from a rounding error to a supply line, almost overnight, and almost nobody has noticed.

What actually changed

Two things happened at once.

First, people started asking assistants instead of searching. Industry surveys published in 2026 put roughly 30–40% of all search activity inside AI engines now, and report that ChatGPT has become the third-most-common way consumers find local businesses — behind Google and Facebook, ahead of everything else. One widely cited figure has 45% of consumers using an AI tool to find a local business, up from about 6% a year earlier. Treat the exact percentages with some suspicion, because this is a young category and the methodologies vary wildly. The direction, though, is not in dispute.

Second — and this is the part that matters for your afternoon — those assistants need somewhere to get local business facts. They don't maintain their own field team driving around verifying that you're open until six. They lean on structured business data that already exists, and Microsoft's local index is one of the biggest sources sitting right underneath the tools people are now asking.

What Bing Places is

It's Microsoft's version of a Google Business Profile. Same idea: your name, address, phone, hours, categories, photos, description, and service area, in a structured listing Microsoft controls and trusts.

The reason it's worth an hour of your time is not Bing's search traffic. It's that this is one of the cheapest ways to hand accurate, structured facts about your business to the systems generating AI answers — and unlike most of what we do in getting a business to show up in ChatGPT, it's a form you fill out once rather than a months-long content effort.

That last row is the real risk. If you've never claimed the listing, there may already be one — auto-generated from old directory data, with a phone number from two moves ago. You're not starting from zero. You might be starting from wrong.

How to claim it without wasting your afternoon

1. Go to Bing Places and search for your business first. Do this before creating anything. If a listing already exists, you want to claim it, not make a duplicate — duplicates are much more annoying to clean up than to avoid.
2. Use the Google import. Bing Places can pull your existing Google Business Profile straight across. It's the single biggest time-saver here and it's easy to miss. Your Google profile is almost certainly your most complete listing, so start from it.
3. Verify. Phone, email, or postcard, same as Google. Postcard takes a few days; pick phone if it's offered.
4. Then fix what the import got wrong. It's a good import, not a perfect one. Categories in particular tend to come across approximately.

The fields that actually matter for AI answers

Not all of them do. If you're short on time, prioritize:

• Categories. This is how a machine decides whether you're a candidate for the question at all. Be specific and be accurate — the temptation to pick every category that vaguely applies makes you a worse match, not a better one.
• Service area and address. Local questions are geographic first. If your coverage area is wrong, nothing else matters.
• Hours, including holiday hours. "Open now" is a filter assistants apply constantly.
• The business description. Write it in plain sentences that answer what you do, who for, and where. Not a slogan. An assistant summarizing you will use these words.
• Services list. Spell out the specific jobs you do. "HVAC" is a category; "ductless mini split installation" is what somebody actually asks for.

And make every one of those facts match what's on your Google profile and your own website, character for character where you can. Consistency across sources is one of the stronger trust signals in this whole game — conflicting hours across three listings is a reason to skip you.

What this won't do

Let's be straight, because there's a lot of breathless nonsense written about AI search right now.

Claiming a Bing listing will not make ChatGPT recommend you. It makes you eligible. The things that get you actually picked — reviews and their sentiment, being mentioned on sites the model already trusts, showing up on "best of" and industry directory lists, having a website that states facts plainly enough to be quoted — those are the harder, slower work. We covered that side in our piece on getting cited in Google's AI Overviews.

It also won't drive meaningful direct traffic. If you claim it and then check your analytics for a Bing spike, you'll be disappointed and you'll conclude the whole thing was pointless. Wrong scoreboard. The return here is being present and correct in a data source that feeds the answers, and that's genuinely hard to measure — which is exactly why so few of your competitors have bothered.

Honestly, that's the best argument for doing it. This is an hour of unglamorous data entry in a place almost nobody in your market is looking. Those don't come along often.

Where it fits

Bing Places is a foundation item, not a strategy. The order that makes sense for most local businesses:

1. Google Business Profile, fully built out. Still the biggest single lever in local. Our GBP guide covers it.
2. Bing Places, imported and corrected. One hour. Do it this week.
3. The industry directories and "best of" lists that AI assistants pull from for your specific vertical.
4. Your own site, written to be quoted — clear answers, real specifics, facts stated in complete sentences.
5. Reviews, continuously. Volume and sentiment both feed recommendations.

Step two is the only one on that list you can finish today. Start there, then get back to the slow work — and if the underlying shift is new to you, our piece on what zero-click search is doing to local businesses explains why any of this is happening in the first place.

Not sure what AI assistants say about your business?

Most owners have never checked — and the answer is usually either "nothing" or "something outdated." We audit both.

• What ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity currently say when someone asks for your service in your city
• Every listing we can find with your name on it, and which ones contradict each other
• Bing Places and Google Business Profile claimed, imported, and filled in properly
• A prioritized list of what would actually move you onto the shortlist

Based in Birmingham, AL. We work with small and local businesses across the U.S.