Why Your Business Needs a Bing Places Listing (Even Though You've Never Used Bing)

I found something out last week that surprised me, and if you run a local business, it should surprise you too.

ChatGPT's search feature doesn't run on Google. It runs on Bing.

Microsoft and OpenAI have a search partnership, and when ChatGPT answers a question like "who's a good [type of business] near me," it's often leaning on Bing's index to do it.

My first reaction was, does anyone even use Bing anymore? I don't know a single person who searches there on purpose. But that's exactly the point. Bing didn't come back. It quietly became the plumbing behind one of the most-used tools in the world, and almost nobody noticed, including me until last week.

That blind spot matters, because Bing Places for Business, Bing's version of a Google Business Profile, is one of the ways your business gets verified information into that index. If you've never claimed one, there's a real chance ChatGPT has incomplete information about your business, or doesn't have you at all.

The fix is genuinely quick. Bing Places lets you import directly from your Google Business Profile, so if you've already got that set up (and you should), most of the fields fill in automatically. It took me about ten minutes.

Here's the bigger shift worth paying attention to: when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, they're often getting three names back, not ten blue links to scroll through. If your business isn't in the index those three names are pulled from, you're not in the running at all.

One thing to watch: make sure your business name, address, and phone number match exactly across Google, Bing, and your own website. A small mismatch is often the reason a listing gets flagged as unverified or left out of results entirely.

This is the kind of gap I look for when I run an AI visibility audit for a client, small, unglamorous, and usually invisible until someone actually checks. If you want to know what ChatGPT and other AI tools currently say about your business, that's a conversation worth having.

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