Key Takeaways
- Bing Site Scan is a free, on-demand technical SEO auditing tool in Bing Webmaster Tools for verified websites.
- Unlike URL Inspection, it audits multiple URLs to identify recurring crawl, structural, and on-page SEO issues.
- Scans can cover an entire website, directory, sitemap, or selected URL list, with findings grouped by severity and affected pages.
- Errors, warnings, and notices prioritize issues, but a clean scan does not guarantee rankings or replace broader SEO analysis.
Bing Site Scan is a technical auditing feature in Bing Webmaster Tools that crawls a defined set of pages and reports common SEO problems across them.
Unlike Bing URL Inspection, which focuses on one URL at a time, Site Scan is designed to identify patterns across multiple pages. It can audit a full site, a specific directory, a sitemap, or a selected list of URLs, then group findings by severity and affected pages.
Microsoft introduced Site Scan in 2020 as part of the redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools platform. The company documents Site Scan as using a Bingbot user agent for its audit crawl. The scan should still be treated as a diagnostic audit rather than an exact reproduction of Bing’s production crawling behavior.
What Is Bing Site Scan Used For?
Bing Site Scan is mainly used to uncover technical crawl problems, on-page SEO issues, and structural patterns that affect multiple URLs.
Finding Technical Crawl Problems
Site Scan can help identify issues such as:
- HTTP Errors: Detects problematic 4xx and 5xx responses.
- Broken Links: Finds links that lead to unavailable or invalid URLs.
- Redirect Problems: Highlights problematic redirect behavior where detected.
- Crawl Accessibility Issues: Surfaces conditions that may interfere with successful crawling.
These checks are useful when a technical problem affects an entire section of a site rather than one isolated page.
Checking On-Page SEO Elements
Site Scan can also flag common page-level issues, including:
- missing meta descriptions;
- title tags that are missing, too long, or too short;
- missing image alt attributes;
- missing or multiple H1 headings;
- multiple or problematic canonical tags;
- oversized HTML documents.
Not every issue has the same severity. Bing classifies findings according to how important they are likely to be for technical SEO.
Auditing Specific Site Sections
Site Scan supports three main scan scopes:
- Website: Crawls from a selected site, subdomain, or directory and follows in-scope links.
- Sitemap: Restricts the scan to URLs listed in a selected sitemap.
- URL List: Audits a defined list of individual URLs.
This makes the tool useful for both broad audits and focused checks, such as reviewing only a redesigned product section.
How to Configure and Run a Bing Site Scan
A website must already be added and verified in Bing Webmaster Tools before Site Scan can be used.
To run a scan:
- Open Site Scan in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Select Start new scan.
- Enter a descriptive Scan Name.
- Choose the required scan Scope.
- Configure any applicable crawl limits and advanced settings.
- Start the scan and review the report after processing completes.
Choosing the Scan Scope
The correct scope depends on the audit goal.
A Website scan is suitable for broad technical checks across a site or directory. A Sitemap scan is useful when only URLs listed in a specific sitemap need to be reviewed. A URL List works well for a smaller, controlled set of pages.
Advanced Scan Settings
Bing provides several controls for managing how a scan runs, including:
- Maximum Scan Depth: Limits how deeply the crawler follows links.
- Crawling Speed: Controls how aggressively the site is scanned.
- URL Parameters to Ignore: Prevents unnecessary duplicate URL variations from consuming scan quota.
- Ignore robots.txt: Allows the diagnostic scanner to bypass robots.txt restrictions during the audit.
- Email Notifications: Can send scan updates to the registered email address.
Microsoft warns that setting crawl speed too high can affect site performance, so aggressive crawling should be used carefully.
Bing calculates the available monthly scan quota automatically for each site rather than applying one fixed limit to every website.
Understanding Errors, Warnings, and Notices
Bing Site Scan classifies findings by severity rather than combining them into a documented numerical health score.
Errors
Errors are the highest-severity findings and should usually be investigated first. They can include serious crawl or technical problems that may interfere with indexing or page accessibility. These issues should usually be prioritized because Microsoft says Errors can affect a website’s indexability.
Warnings
Warnings are medium-severity issues. They may not prevent crawling or indexing, but they can indicate technical or on-page problems that deserve attention. They may not be as critical as Errors, but they can still affect the site’s SEO health and should be reviewed.
Notices
Notices are lower-severity recommendations or observations. They are generally less urgent than errors and warnings but may still reveal useful optimization opportunities. They are best reviewed after higher-priority issues have been resolved.
A completed scan can show scan status, pages scanned, number of errors, number of warnings, issues detected, issue severity, and affected URLs. Selecting an issue opens its Issue Details view, where affected pages can be reviewed. The URL list can also be exported as CSV.
Technical Audit, Not a Ranking Score
A clean Bing Site Scan does not guarantee higher rankings in Bing or Google. The tool checks selected technical and on-page SEO conditions, but it does not measure the full range of relevance, content quality, links, competition, and other signals used by search engines.
Structural Checks, Crawl Controls, and Site Scan Limitations
Site Scan is particularly useful for finding structural SEO problems across groups of pages. It can identify issues involving titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt attributes, canonical tags, HTTP responses, HTML size, and other crawlable page elements.
Its crawl controls also make it possible to limit unnecessary scanning. Maximum scan depth, crawl speed, ignored parameters, and robots.txt handling can be adjusted to match the purpose of the audit. This is especially useful on large ecommerce or faceted-navigation sites where many parameterized URLs may otherwise consume the available scan quota.
Site Scan does not replace every technical SEO tool. It is not a Core Web Vitals analyzer, dedicated mobile-usability tester, full structured-data validator, backlink-analysis platform, or crawl-budget reporting system. Those tasks require other Bing Webmaster Tools features or specialized tools. For example, for deeper diagnosis, individual affected pages can be checked with Bing URL Inspection, while robots.txt rules can be tested separately with Bing’s robots.txt Tester.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Bing Site Scan determine issue severity?
Bing classifies findings as Errors, Warnings, or Notices according to their technical severity. Errors are generally the most urgent, followed by warnings and then notices.
Does a clean Bing Site Scan guarantee higher rankings?
A clean Site Scan means the tool did not detect issues covered by its automated checks; it does not mean every SEO or ranking factor has been evaluated. Search rankings depend on many additional factors, including relevance, content quality, links, competition, and broader ranking systems.
Will running a Bing Site Scan slow down a website?
It can if crawl speed is configured too aggressively. Bing provides crawl-speed controls, and lower settings are safer for sites with limited server capacity.
How is Bing Site Scan different from URL Inspection?
Site Scan audits multiple URLs to identify technical patterns across a site or section. URL Inspection provides deeper crawl, indexing, SEO, and markup diagnostics for one specific URL.
