Bing and Microsoft Copilot Malaysia: list your business

Claim your free Bing Places listing at bing.com/forbusiness, and add your website to Bing Webmaster Tools. Those two free steps cover Bing search, Bing Maps and the Bing index Microsoft Copilot queries. They do not cover ChatGPT. ChatGPT reads the web through its own crawler, and that crawler has to be allowed.

Does ChatGPT actually run on Bing?

ChatGPT uses Bing partly, and not the way most articles put it. OpenAI's own help page says "ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers", plural. For Enterprise and Edu workspaces OpenAI documents that ChatGPT "may share disassociated search queries with the Bing search engine to return web results". So Bing is one input into ChatGPT, not the pipe itself.

The thing that decides whether ChatGPT can use your site at all is OpenAI's own crawler. Its crawler documentation is direct about the consequence: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." A business can be indexed perfectly in Bing, block that one crawler, and stay absent from ChatGPT's answers.

OpenAI is equally blunt about the ceiling. "Placement is not guaranteed." Treat anyone promising you a ChatGPT mention accordingly. If you have never tested what the assistants currently say, start with how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business.

How do I list my business on Bing Places for Business (and Copilot)?

Claim a free Bing Places for Business listing. Microsoft calls it "a free online platform where businesses can create and manage their listings to appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps". Since 3 October 2025 the owner's portal has lived at bing.com/forbusiness. There is no separate submission form for Copilot.

1. Open bing.com/forbusiness and sign in with a Microsoft account.
2. Import from Google instead of retyping. Microsoft says the rebuilt portal brings "major improvements to how business owners import listings from Google", so an existing Google Business Profile carries your name, hours and contact details across.
3. Fill the gaps the import leaves thin: full address with postcode, a Malaysian phone number a customer can actually reach, service areas if you travel to them, and your website link.
4. Verify the listing, then keep it current. A wrong closing time is a wrong answer in Bing Maps.

If you have not claimed the Google side yet, do that one first, because it is both the larger surface and the source you will import from: Google Business Profile setup in Malaysia.

How do I submit my website to Bing Webmaster Tools?

Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools, which is free. Microsoft's own getting-started checklist leads with "verification and adding a sitemap". After that you can push pages at Bing directly. Microsoft documents "two methods to actively submit URLs to Bing: the submit your site form and the Submit URLs feature in Webmaster Tools".

The faster route for a site that changes often is IndexNow, which notifies participating search engines the moment a page is added, updated or removed. Setup is a plain text file: a key of 8 to 128 characters, saved as its own filename. IndexNow's instruction is to "Place the key file in the root directory of your site, or any publicly accessible folder on the same host (no login required)". Acclaira's own publishing pipeline pings IndexNow on every deploy and checks the key file is live before sending the ping.

Keep the expectation honest, because both sources say so plainly. Microsoft: "Using IndexNow does not guarantee that web pages will be crawled or indexed by search engines." IndexNow's FAQ: "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing." Worth noticing while you are in there: Microsoft's own product copy now reads "Our unique SEO/GEO tools let you explore your site, analyse backlinks, manage keywords and more", GEO being generative engine optimisation. The search engine has renamed its own toolkit around AI answers. None of it helps if a crawler cannot read your pages in the first place, which is a separate job: how to make your website AI-ready in Malaysia.

What must I allow so ChatGPT can see the site?

ChatGPT needs one crawler allowed in two places. OpenAI's instruction is "To make a website eligible for inclusion, allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site", and then to confirm that your host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses. The first is a line in robots.txt. The second catches people, because a hosting firewall or CDN rule can block a crawler that robots.txt happily invites.

Allow it, then wait before you judge. OpenAI notes that "it can take ~24 hours from a site's robots.txt update for our systems to adjust". This is also the cheapest thing on the whole list to get wrong: nothing in your Bing setup, your schema or your content reaches ChatGPT's answers if that one crawler is turned away at the door.

Is any of this worth the hour in Malaysia?

Yes, but not for the Bing traffic, and you should size it honestly before you start. Bing held 4.42% of Malaysian search-engine share in August 2026 against Google's 92.99%, which makes Google about 21 times larger here. The return is the AI surfaces sitting on top of that small index, plus a free measurement tool most Malaysian businesses have never opened.

Browser share, from the same dataset, runs Chrome 73.77%, Safari 15.07% and Edge 4.71%. Figures from Statcounter Global Stats for Malaysia, August 2026: search engines and browsers.

How do I check whether it worked?

Bing Webmaster Tools reports it, at no cost. It carries an AI Performance report, which Microsoft describes as containing "information about your site's AI performance on Microsoft Copilots and partner surfaces". Its URL Inspection tool goes one step further and reports "grounding eligibility across Microsoft search experiences", telling you whether a page is even a candidate for an AI answer.

What you will not see there is ChatGPT, which publishes no equivalent report. For that side you test the answers yourself and watch what arrives: ChatGPT referral traffic in GA4. One more tool worth knowing exists before you need it in a hurry: Bing's Block URLs feature will "Temporarily hide URLs from Bing and Copilot search results", and temporarily is the operative word.

Here is our own measurement, for scale. On 21 September 2026 we asked ChatGPT and Gemini three of the questions in this article, from Malaysia. Between them the answers cited 15 distinct domains, and not one of those domains was Malaysian. The engines are answering this question today using Microsoft's documentation and foreign marketing blogs, which means the local version of the answer is still unclaimed.

What should you do this week?

Do the two free Bing steps, then stop. Claim the Bing Places listing at bing.com/forbusiness, add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap, and check that neither robots.txt nor your CDN is turning OAI-SearchBot away. That is roughly an hour of work, once, on surfaces most of your competitors have never claimed.

Then keep the expectations where the documentation puts them. Neither Microsoft nor OpenAI promises indexing, and OpenAI states outright that placement is not guaranteed. If an assistant is already telling customers something wrong about your business, listing yourself is only half the repair: what to do when ChatGPT has wrong information about your business.

Acclaira is a Malaysian studio working mostly across the Klang Valley and Selangor, and this is the kind of setup we run for clients as part of an ongoing AI SEO programme. Dan also teaches a free one-hour class on Zoom every Thursday at 9.30pm Malaysian time, where questions like this one get answered live. Registration is by WhatsApp.

Sources

• OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers
• OpenAI Help Center, ChatGPT search for Enterprise and Edu
• Microsoft Support, How web search works in Microsoft Copilot Chat and agents
• Bing Search Blog, Introducing the New Bing Places for Business
• Bing Webmaster Tools Help, Getting Started Checklist
• Bing Webmaster Tools Help, URL Submission
• Bing Webmaster Tools Help Center, article index
• Microsoft Bing, How to add IndexNow to your website
• IndexNow.org FAQ
• Statcounter Global Stats, Search Engine Market Share Malaysia