Reading the data

Bing's API has gaps that are easy to misread. bwt is explicit about them, and this page explains why.

Performance data is Bing's top rowsCopy Anchor Link

The stats methods return Bing's own selection of top rows. The API has no server-side date range, row limit, or paging.

• --since, --until, --limit, and --sort filter and sort locally, and JSON output says so with filtered_locally: true.
• Never add up query or page rows to get site totals. Use bwt stats summary, which sums the daily site traffic over a stated window and recomputes CTR from the sums.
• Query and page statistics update weekly; site traffic and query traffic update daily.
• Positions (AvgClickPosition, AvgImpressionPosition) are printed exactly as Bing returns them, because Microsoft does not document their scale.
• A new or low-traffic site returns no rows at all. That is missing data, not zero traffic.

Accepted is not indexedCopy Anchor Link

bwt submit urls, bwt submit content, and bwt indexnow submit report what Bing received. A 200 or 202 from IndexNow means the submission was accepted (202: the key is still being validated). None of them means the URL is, or will be, indexed.

There is no indexing verdictCopy Anchor Link

bwt url info shows crawl details: last crawl, discovery date, HTTP status, size, and child count. The API has no "indexed" field, and a zero status or IsPage: false describes crawling, not indexing.

On a site without crawl data, the URL methods (url info, url traffic, url children) return Bing's UnknownError. Microsoft documents no cause, so treat it as "no answer", not "not indexed".

Empty is not healthyCopy Anchor Link

bwt links and bwt crawl issues can return empty lists for sites that do have links or issues. Fixed crawl issues can also stay listed for several days. bwt notes this on stderr; an empty result is not proof of anything.

Quotas belong to each siteCopy Anchor Link

bwt quota shows Bing's daily and monthly counters exactly as returned. Every submit urls call spends quota, even for a URL you already submitted, so bwt never resubmits automatically. IndexNow has no Bing quota and reaches every participating search engine, so prefer it for new or changed URLs.