Indexed by Microsoft Bing but Missing From Search Results

I have been dealing with a strange Bing search issue for about a year, and I want to document it in case other website owners are experiencing something similar.

According to Bing Webmaster Tools, my website is indexed. However, it does not appear in Bing search results at all. Even direct site: searches return zero results. DuckDuckGo, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines which rely on Bing’s index, also show nothing.

From a practical standpoint, the website might as well not exist on Bing.

What Changed and When the Problem Started

Historically, Bing traffic for this website was low compared to Google, but it was steady. I assumed this was simply due to lower Bing usage overall. Still, it was real traffic. Seeing Bing traffic drop to zero was different and concerning.

In March 2025, I signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to get more visibility into the site’s performance. Everything looked normal. Pages were indexed, impressions matched expectations, and no issues were reported.

Around the same time, I enabled IndexNow through Cloudflare.

Within a couple of weeks, the website completely disappeared from Bing search results.

At first, I assumed the issue was temporary. After waiting several weeks with no change, I opened a support ticket through Bing Webmaster Tools in April 2025 and started reviewing everything on my end.

I focused on basic technical hygiene and compliance with Bing Webmaster Guidelines:

• Verified robots.txt was not blocking crawlers.
• Used semantic markup.
• Used HTML5 semantic elements.
• Fixed HTML validation issues using the W3C Markup Validation Service.
• Adjusted title tags and description lengths.
• Verified canonical tags.
• Cleaned up the XML sitemap and added lastmod dates.
• Corrected issues identified by PageSpeed Insights.
• Verified that there are no content removal notices.

Nothing I found suggested a reason for full removal.

Backlinks

One thing worth noting is that I do not do backlink building. This is a hobby website, not a business. I do not promote it, market it, or actively seek links.

That said, the purpose of the website is to help people solve very specific technical problems. I want the content to be discoverable by people searching for those issues. When I compared my website to similar ones that do appear in Bing, many of them also had little to no backlink profile. That made backlinks feel like an unlikely sole cause, although it remains a possibility.

IndexNow and Cloudflare Concerns

After noticing that Cloudflare was submitting non-HTML assets such as WebP files through IndexNow, many of which failed submission, I disabled IndexNow entirely. I do not know if this contributed to the issue, but I wanted to remove it as a variable.

Disabling IndexNow made no difference.

Bing Support Timeline and Temporary Recovery

In August 2025, about four months after opening the support ticket, Microsoft responded. They confirmed that the website was not flagged and said the issue was being escalated to another support team.

Then nothing happened for another four months.

In December 2025, I finally received a follow-up stating that the issue was resolved. They included a screenshot showing my website appearing in a Bing site: search. For about two weeks, everything worked. Pages appeared in search results, impressions returned, and Bing Webmaster Tools reflected normal activity.

Then the website disappeared again.

Current Status

As of now, Bing Webmaster Tools still reports that the website is indexed. However, it does not appear in Bing or DuckDuckGo search results at all. There are zero impressions and zero clicks.

I have opened another support ticket, but the process feels cyclical. Long delays, vague responses, a brief recovery, and then the same failure all over again.

Why I Am Sharing This

I am posting this primarily to see if other website owners have experienced a similar issue, specifically cases where Bing reports a website as indexed but it is effectively invisible in search.

Ironically, if you are using Bing or DuckDuckGo, you will probably never find this post. The website has no issues appearing in Google search results.

Summary

Bing continues to show my website as indexed while failing to display it in search results. Support responses have been slow and inconsistent, producing only temporary fixes. If others are seeing similar behavior, this may point to a deeper indexing or visibility issue within Bing itself. Alternatively, the website may not meet some undocumented or unclear Bing guidelines.

For now, I am letting the current support ticket play out and making no additional attempts to resolve it on my end.