Bing vs Google: Bing Sent Our Small Site Nearly 4x the Clicks
Google showed our pages 9,570 times and sent 8 clicks. Bing showed them 593 times and sent 30. Here is what the gap looks like from the inside, and what we changed because of it.
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For four weeks this summer, Google showed our pages 9,570 times and sent us 8 clicks. Bing showed them 593 times and sent 30.
This site is small. It is a set of free browser tools and a blog, with a Domain Rating of 3 in Ahrefs and no backlinks worth counting. By the usual reading of search market share, Bing shouldn't matter to it. Google holds 91.1% of search worldwide and Bing holds 4.5%, according to StatCounter's figures for August 2026 [1].
Our own numbers say otherwise, and after reading what other site owners reported on Reddit, I don't think we're unusual.
The numbers, side by side
All figures cover the same 28 days, 17 August to 13 September 2026, and come from each engine's own console.
| Google Search Console | Bing Webmaster Tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 9,570 | 593 |
| Clicks | 8 | 30 |
| Click-through rate | 0.08% | 5.1% |
| Where our pages sit | around position 63 | mostly positions 2 to 9 |
Google showed us to sixteen times as many people. Bing sent nearly four times as many of them to the site.
The gap comes down to position. Google places the site around page seven. Bing puts the same pages, with the same content, on page one. At position 63, an impression rarely turns into a click.
GA4 tells the same story with sessions instead of clicks. Of 64 organic search sessions in that window, 32 came from Bing, counting bing.com and cn.bing.com. Google brought 22, Yahoo 7 and DuckDuckGo 3.
One page does most of the work
Our bulk URL checker earned 21 of those 30 Bing clicks, from 224 impressions at an average position of 4.2.
On Google, the same page had 1,293 impressions, an average position of 60.7, and zero clicks.
It's the best page on the site, and Search Console shows no sign of that. If we only looked at Google's data, we'd have written the page off.
We are not the only ones
On r/SEO in September, a site owner described nearly the same split on a new utility site [2]. Google gave them 245 impressions, 2 clicks and an average position of 39.1. Bing gave them roughly 9,500 impressions and 148 clicks, and one page, a random name picker, was already sitting at position 8.69.
A few weeks earlier, someone relaunching a site they'd run for 17 years reported Bing sending about 600 impressions a day within a week, while Google sent about ten [3].
The pattern isn't universal. In that second thread, another commenter said Bing deindexed their whole site after they switched platforms, and Google carried them instead [3]. Bing can be quick in both directions.
Why Bing ranks small sites sooner
Nobody outside Microsoft can see the ranking systems, so treat this part as my read of the evidence rather than a finding.
Fewer people are optimising for it. In the r/SEO thread, one reply argued that because content gets tailored to Google, a site can land in a lower-competition slice of Bing's index [2]. That fits what we see. The queries Bing ranks us for are specific tool queries, where a working tool is a strong answer and Bing has fewer tuned pages to choose between.
It moves faster on new pages. Between 8 and 13 September, the number of our pages in Bing's index went from 88 to 102, with 112 pages crawled on the 13th alone. Over the same period, Google hadn't downloaded our sitemap since 7 September, so none of the pages we shipped that week were in the copy it held.
It doesn't seem to wait for authority first. Ahrefs counts 458 referring domains for us, nearly all of them link-farm spam, with a Domain Rating of 3.0. Bing reports 8 inbound links in total. Both engines have discounted the junk. Bing ranks us anyway, while Google appears to want signals we don't have yet.
Bing matters more than 4.5% suggests
Market share counts searches, but a site owner cares about clicks that land on the site. For a small site, those are different things.
For us, a search engine with 91% share that ranked us on page seven sent fewer clicks than one with 4.5% that ranked us on page one. That's before counting the other places Bing's results turn up. OpenAI's help documentation says ChatGPT search for Enterprise and Edu workspaces may share search queries with the Bing search engine to return web results [4]. So Bing's index reaches at least some people who never open bing.com.
What we changed
We started reading Bing Webmaster Tools for performance and indexing, and nothing else. Its automated SEO report isn't worth much. A September thread on r/SEO tore one apart for flagging missing meta descriptions as high severity and an absence of quality backlinks as only moderate [5]. The performance and crawl data, on the other hand, is where we found the bulk checker.
We fixed IndexNow, and found out it had been failing. IndexNow lets a site notify participating search engines when a URL changes, and the protocol shares each submission with every participating engine [6]. Every publish from our site had failed with 429 Too Many Requests, which the documentation describes as potential spam [6].
The cause was where the request came from. Our publishing code ran on Cloudflare Workers. We sent the same key and the same three URLs a few seconds apart. From the Worker, IndexNow returned 429. From an ordinary machine, it returned 200. Our best explanation is that Workers share outbound addresses across many customers, and IndexNow throttles by address.
We moved the notification out of the Worker and into the publishing script. If your site runs on a serverless platform and your IndexNow calls report success, check the status code rather than the absence of an error.
We stopped judging pages on Google clicks alone. A page with zero Google clicks and a dozen Bing clicks is working. A page with zero clicks on both needs work. Search Console alone can't tell those two apart.
The limits of this data
Thirty clicks is a small sample. One more good week or one bad one would move every percentage in this post. The two consoles also count impressions differently, so the click-through rates are only broadly comparable.
What held up across all three sources, and across two unrelated sites on Reddit, is the direction. Bing ranked a new or low-authority site sooner, and on low-competition tool queries, sooner meant more clicks.
For a small site, I'd set up Bing Webmaster Tools on day one, make sure IndexNow actually returns 200, and read Bing's performance report next to Search Console's. Google should still get most of the long-term effort. Bing is where you'll find out sooner whether a page can rank at all.
Sources
- StatCounter Global Stats, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide, August 2026.
- r/SEO, Google vs Bing SEO for a new website. Is this normal?, 12 September 2026.
- r/SEO, Does Google react slower than Bing now?, 23 August 2026.
- OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT search for Enterprise and Edu.
- r/SEO, I want to take Bing Webmaster Tools seriously but then it gives me this report..., 10 September 2026.
- IndexNow.org, Documentation.
First-party figures come from this site's Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4 and Ahrefs accounts, all pulled on 16 September 2026.