Yes, publishers should still pay attention to Bing — but not because it is likely to replace Google as their main search traffic source. On one publishing website we operate, Bing generated 1,498 organic sessions, with a 72.0% engagement rate, around 60 seconds of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session.
What interested us was not simply that Bing sent traffic. It was that, across these engagement measures, the visitors coming from Bing performed better than the site’s Google organic audience during the period we reviewed.
That does not mean Bing traffic is universally better than Google traffic, and it certainly does not mean publishers should suddenly redirect their SEO strategy around Microsoft’s search engine. What it does suggest is that smaller search sources can be more useful than their raw traffic share implies.
For publishers, the more interesting question is therefore not “Is Bing big enough to matter?” but “What kind of visitors is Bing already sending us, and are we measuring them properly?”
Key takeaways
- Bing generated 1,498 organic sessions for one publishing property we operate.
- Those sessions recorded a 72.0% engagement rate, approximately 60 seconds of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session.
- Across those engagement measures, Bing traffic was stronger than Google organic traffic on the same site during the period reviewed.
- This does not prove that Bing users are inherently more valuable or more engaged than Google users.
- Publishers should examine smaller organic search sources before dismissing them based purely on traffic volume.
- We would not build a separate Bing content strategy immediately; we would first identify which pages, topics and audiences are producing the stronger engagement.
How much traffic did Bing actually send?
For the property (Tofu V Travels) that we analysed, Bing generated:
| Bing organic traffic metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Organic sessions | 1,498 |
| Engagement rate | 72.0% |
| Average engagement time | ~60 seconds |
| Events per session | 4.29 |
A little under 1,500 sessions is not enormous for a publishing website. If we had looked only at total traffic volume, Bing would have remained a relatively minor acquisition source. Google was still the much larger organic search channel.
However, the engagement figures made the source more interesting.
A 72.0% engagement rate meant that a substantial majority of those sessions qualified as engaged sessions in GA4. Visitors were also spending roughly a minute actively engaged with the site and generating more than four tracked events per session.
For this property, Bing organic visitors were more engaged than Google organic visitors across the engagement metrics we reviewed. That was enough to make us stop treating Bing as an incidental line in the acquisition report.
Is Bing traffic better than Google traffic?
Not necessarily. Our data shows that Bing traffic performed better on certain engagement metrics for one publishing website over one reporting period. It does not establish that Bing users are generally more engaged than Google users.
There are several reasons the numbers could differ. Bing and Google may send visitors through different queries. They may surface different articles. Their users may have different device, demographic or geographic profiles. A handful of particularly strong landing pages can also pull the average engagement figures for a smaller traffic source upwards.
There is also an important distinction between engagement and commercial value.
A visitor who spends a minute reading an article may be valuable to an editorial publisher, particularly if the business earns from display advertising, affiliate links, subscriptions or repeat readership. But high engagement does not automatically mean higher revenue, better conversion rates or stronger lifetime value.
The conclusion we are comfortable making is narrower:
The Bing traffic reaching this publishing site was sufficiently engaged that it would have been a mistake to dismiss the channel simply because it was much smaller than Google.
Why should publishers still care about Bing?
Publishers should care about Bing when it is already sending them meaningful traffic at little or no additional content cost.
We did not create a separate editorial calendar for Bing, nor were we producing one version of an article for Google and another for Microsoft. The same underlying pages were attracting visitors from both search engines.
In other words, those 1,498 Bing sessions were largely incremental distribution from content that already existed.
For an individual article, an extra handful of visits from another search engine may not matter much. Across dozens or hundreds of evergreen pages, however, small sources of incremental traffic can add up.
That is especially relevant for publishers whose economics depend on accumulating useful audiences from many sources rather than relying entirely on one viral article or one platform.
Google may remain the dominant search source, but organic traffic does not have to come exclusively from Google to be valuable.
Why publishers often ignore Bing
Bing is easy to ignore because, in most publisher dashboards, Google is the number that dominates the page. That shapes the entire SEO workflow. Publishers check Google Search Console first. Ranking reports are usually discussed in terms of Google positions. When organic traffic falls, the immediate questions tend to be about a Google algorithm update, indexing issue or SERP change.
None of that is unreasonable. If Google supplies the majority of your search traffic, it deserves the majority of your attention.
The problem is when “Google is our biggest search source” becomes “everything else is too small to be worth looking at.”
A search engine contributing only 1%, 2% or 5% of sessions may look insignificant beside Google in an acquisition report. But percentage share only tells you how much traffic a channel contributes. It says nothing about whether those visitors read more deeply, return more often, click more pages or generate better commercial outcomes.
That distinction is exactly what made our Bing data interesting. 1,498 sessions was not the number that caught our attention for long. The 72.0% engagement rate, roughly 60 seconds of engagement time and 4.29 events per session were.
For publishers, smaller traffic sources are often worth examining precisely because they are easy to overlook. You do not need to give Bing the same strategic weight as Google. You do need enough visibility to notice when a supposedly minor channel is quietly sending some of your more engaged readers.
In other words, traffic volume tells you where your audience came from. Traffic quality tells you whether that audience was worth having.
What should publishers check before deciding Bing does not matter?
The easiest mistake is to look at Bing’s share of total traffic, decide the number is small, and move on.
A better starting point is to separate Bing from the rest of your organic search traffic and compare it with Google on the things that matter after the click. Sessions still matter, of course, but so do engagement rate, average engagement time, events per session, landing pages, conversions, revenue per session where you have it, and differences in device or geography.
The landing-page comparison is particularly useful because channel averages can hide a lot.
Suppose Bing sends 1,500 sessions, but 900 of them land on two evergreen guides that already happen to be among the strongest pages on the site. In that case, the story may not be that Bing users are somehow more engaged. It may simply be that Bing is surfacing a different mix of content from Google.
That distinction is worth teasing out. If Bing consistently sends traffic to certain topics or page types, there may be something there for the editorial team to learn from. If the difference disappears once you compare the same landing pages across both search engines, then the apparent advantage is probably more about content mix than audience quality.
This is why we would not stop at the headline figures. A good-looking number is useful, but mostly because it tells you where to look next.
Should publishers optimise specifically for Bing?
We would not rush into building a separate Bing strategy.
For most publishers, that would be overkill. The more sensible first step is to make sure the site is technically accessible, see what Bing is already finding, and work out whether there are patterns in the pages it sends traffic to.
If Bing is already contributing meaningful traffic, we would look at which pages perform best there, whether certain topics appear more often than they do on Google, and whether those visitors behave differently once they arrive. Do they read more? Subscribe more often? Click more affiliate links? Generate more advertising revenue?
Those questions are much more useful than asking whether you should “optimise for Bing” in the abstract.
The wrong conclusion from 1,498 engaged sessions would be that the site suddenly needs dozens of articles written specifically for Bing. The better conclusion is that there may be an existing source of traffic worth understanding before you decide whether it deserves more attention.
Sometimes the opportunity is larger than expected. Sometimes it is simply a nice stream of incremental traffic from content you were already publishing anyway.
What does good Bing traffic look like for a publisher?
There is no single number that tells you whether Bing traffic is good.
An ad-supported publisher may care most about how long people stay, how many pages they view and how many ad impressions those visits generate. An affiliate site may care far more about outbound clicks or revenue per session. A publication built around newsletters may be happy with relatively little traffic if those visitors subscribe at a strong rate.
That is why volume alone is not a particularly good measure of whether a smaller search engine is worth paying attention to.
For the property we looked at, the combination of a 72.0% engagement rate, roughly 60 seconds of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session was enough to make us curious. Those numbers did not prove that Bing was commercially more valuable, but they did suggest the traffic was doing more than bouncing in and out.
The next question is whether that engagement leads to something the site actually cares about, whether that is repeat readership, subscriptions, ad revenue, affiliate clicks or deeper browsing.
That is where “interesting traffic” starts to become useful traffic.
What could explain stronger Bing engagement?
There are plenty of possible explanations, and we would be cautious about picking one without digging further into the data.
Bing may be sending people through more specific searches. It may be surfacing a different set of articles from Google. Its users may skew towards different devices, countries or browsing habits. Or the whole effect may simply come down to the fact that Bing is sending more people to pages that already perform well.
That is why channel-level numbers can only take you so far. They can tell you that something unusual is happening, but not necessarily what is causing it.
If we found that Bing repeatedly sends readers to a particular topic cluster, that would be interesting from an editorial point of view. It might tell us that certain pieces of content have more search potential than we realised.
If, on the other hand, the engagement advantage disappeared once we compared the same landing pages across Bing and Google, then the story would be different. In that case, the stronger channel average would be more about which pages Bing chose to surface than who was using the search engine.
Either way, there is something worth learning. The point is not to turn every odd-looking metric into a strategy. It is to notice the pattern, test what is behind it, and only then decide whether it deserves action.
Bing is also a useful reminder not to build your entire audience around one source
The broader point here is not really about Bing. It is about how easy it is for publishers to become dependent on one discovery channel simply because that channel happens to be the biggest.
Google understandably gets most of the attention in search. For many publishers, it will continue to send far more traffic than anything else. But the more concentrated your audience acquisition becomes, the more exposed you are when rankings shift, search layouts change or another platform starts keeping more of the click for itself.
That does not mean every publisher should suddenly start chasing every traffic source available. Quite the opposite: trying to be everywhere usually creates more work than value.
What does make sense is paying attention to sources that are already sending useful readers without requiring a completely separate publishing operation. If Google, Bing, newsletters, referrals, direct visits, social and newer answer-driven platforms are all contributing something, even in very different proportions, the site is less reliant on any one of them.
The most useful lesson from our 1,498 Bing sessions
What surprised us was not that Bing appeared in the analytics report. We knew it was there. What really surprised us was how easy it would have been to dismiss it.
Google was still the much larger source of organic traffic, so the obvious instinct was to focus on that. Bing sat further down the report with a much smaller number beside it.
Then we looked at how those visitors behaved: the 1,498 Bing sessions came with a 72.0% engagement rate, roughly one minute of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session. That was enough to change the question from “Does Bing matter?” to “Why is this traffic behaving so well?”
That is the kind of thing we find useful when running our own publishing properties. The most interesting insight is not always attached to the biggest number in the dashboard.
Sometimes a smaller source shows that a particular type of content is travelling further than expected. Sometimes it reveals a different audience. Sometimes it is simply a useful stream of readers that would have gone unnoticed if we had only looked at Google.
For us, that is the real takeaway from this example.
The better question is not always which channel sends the most traffic?
Sometimes it is what are we missing because we only looked at the biggest one?
Should publishers still care about Bing?
Yes, if their own data gives them a reason to.
That does not mean treating Bing as though it deserves the same time or budget as Google. On most publishing sites, Google will still account for far more search traffic and will naturally get more attention. But smaller does not automatically mean unimportant!
On the property we reviewed, Bing generated 1,498 organic sessions, with a 72.0% engagement rate, around 60 seconds of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session. Across the engagement metrics we looked at, that traffic performed better than Google organic traffic during the same period.
We would not take that as proof that Bing users are inherently better readers. There are too many other variables involved for that. What it does show, however, is that the traffic was better than its relatively small share of total search visits might have suggested.
For publishers, that is probably the more useful lesson: do not decide a traffic source is irrelevant until you have looked at what the people arriving from it actually do.
About this analysis
This Insight is based on analytics from a publishing property operated by The Tofu Media Group.
We compared organic acquisition sources and identified 1,498 sessions from Bing organic search, with a 72.0% engagement rate, approximately 60 seconds of average engagement time and 4.29 events per session.
This was an observational comparison rather than a controlled experiment. Search intent, audience composition, landing pages, device mix and traffic volume can differ significantly between search engines.
The figures therefore should not be interpreted as evidence that Bing traffic is universally more engaged than Google traffic.
What we would analyse next
The next useful step is to compare Bing and Google at landing-page level.
We would examine whether the stronger Bing engagement is distributed across the site or driven by a handful of unusually strong pages, then compare topic clusters, devices, geography, conversions and monetisation outcomes.
That would help answer the more valuable question: is Bing simply sending engaged traffic, or is there a repeatable publishing opportunity behind it?
Frequently asked questions
Is Bing still relevant for SEO?
Yes, Bing can still be relevant for publishers if it sends meaningful organic traffic or valuable visitors. Its importance should be evaluated using a site’s own traffic, engagement and conversion data rather than assumed from its smaller overall traffic share.
Is Bing traffic better than Google traffic?
Not necessarily. On the publishing website we analysed, Bing visitors showed stronger engagement across several metrics, but the result applies only to that property and reporting period. Different queries, audiences and landing pages can produce very different results.
Should publishers create separate content for Bing?
Usually not as a first step. Publishers should first identify which existing articles Bing already sends traffic to and compare the performance of those visitors with other organic sources.
How can publishers check Bing traffic in GA4?
Publishers can review traffic acquisition data in GA4 and compare organic search traffic by source. Useful metrics include sessions, engagement rate, average engagement time, events per session and conversions.
What should publishers measure besides Bing traffic volume?
Look at engagement rate, average engagement time, landing pages, events per session, conversions, revenue, device mix and geography. A smaller source can still be useful if its visitors are disproportionately engaged or commercially valuable.
Why might Bing visitors be more engaged?
Possible reasons include differences in search queries, landing-page distribution, devices, geography or audience profile. Stronger engagement should therefore be investigated rather than automatically attributed to the search engine itself.
Is it worth optimising a website for Bing?
It may be worth making sure Bing can crawl and understand the site and then examining areas where it already performs well. A large standalone optimisation programme is harder to justify unless the site’s own data shows a meaningful opportunity.