Google Business Profile vs. Bing Places: Do You Need Both for AI Visibility?

Yes, you should maintain both, and here's why in plain terms: different AI tools pull their information from different places. Google's AI Overviews and Google's own search results rely heavily on your Google Business Profile (the free listing that shows your hours, address, reviews and photos when someone searches your business on Google or Maps). But tools like Microsoft Copilot and, to a meaningful extent, ChatGPT's web search feature, draw on Bing's index and Bing Places (Microsoft's equivalent free business listing). If you've only set up your Google listing, you're invisible to a growing slice of AI-driven searches happening outside Google entirely.

Which AI tools use Bing data, and which use Google?

For over a decade, the advice for local businesses was simple: get your Google Business Profile sorted and you're covered. Google dominated search, so Google was where the effort went. Bing Places was often treated as an afterthought — something you filled in once and forgot.

That calculation has changed because of how AI answer engines actually work under the hood:

• ChatGPT's web search draws heavily on Bing's index. This is public, well-documented information about how OpenAI's search integration is built. When someone asks ChatGPT "who's a good plumber near me" and it does a live web lookup, Bing's data (including Bing Places listings) is part of what feeds that answer.
• Microsoft Copilot, unsurprisingly, is built on Bing directly. If a customer uses Copilot (built into Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365) to find a local accountant or dentist, Bing Places data is front and centre.
• Google's AI Overviews and Gemini naturally lean on Google's own index and Google Business Profile data, plus Google's local knowledge graph.

So the honest answer is: these AI tools don't share one common database. They each have their own primary source, and if your business only exists properly in one of them, you're only reachable through half the AI search landscape.

What is Bing Places, and what goes in a listing?

Bing Places for Business is Microsoft's free directory listing — the equivalent of Google Business Profile. It covers the same basics:

• Business name, address, phone number (often called "NAP" data)
• Opening hours
• Category/type of business
• Photos
• Customer reviews
• Website link

The good news is that Bing Places lets you import directly from an existing Google Business Profile, which cuts down the setup effort considerably. The bad news is that most SME owners either don't know it exists or set it up once, years ago, and never touch it again — so the hours are wrong, the address is outdated, or the category no longer matches what the business actually does.

That matters more with AI than it did with traditional search. A human doing a Google search can often spot an outdated listing and dig for the real answer. An AI tool generating a direct answer is more likely to just repeat whatever inconsistent or stale information it finds — and if it's citing Bing data that hasn't been touched since 2019, that's what your prospective customer sees.

Does my Google and Bing information have to match?

It's not enough to have both listings existing — they need to agree with each other. If your Google Business Profile says you're open until 6pm and Bing Places says 5pm, that's a small thing to a human who might just call to check. But AI systems use consistency across sources as a signal of trustworthiness. Conflicting information across your Google listing, Bing listing, website, and directory citations can make an AI tool less confident about presenting your business at all, or cause it to surface the wrong details.

This is also where structured data comes in — sometimes called schema markup, which is just a standardised way of labelling information on your website (like your address, phone number, or opening hours) so that search engines and AI tools can read it with certainty rather than having to guess from the page's normal text. Keeping your website's schema markup, Google Business Profile, and Bing Places all telling the same story is one of the more reliable ways to be picked up correctly across multiple AI tools.

Do You Need to Actively Manage Bing Places, or Just Set It Up?

Setting it up once is better than nothing, but ongoing management matters for the same reason it matters on Google: hours change, phone numbers change, services get added, and reviews accumulate. A stale Bing Places listing is a missed opportunity at best and a source of wrong information at worst — and unlike Google, most business owners aren't in the habit of checking it, so errors can sit there unnoticed for years.

How important is Bing Places compared with everything else?

Google Business Profile and Bing Places are both part of a wider picture that includes your website's structured data, the consistency of your business information across directories, and whether AI tools can find clear, accurate answers to the questions customers actually ask about your business. Handling one listing well and ignoring the other leaves a gap — and it's often a gap the business owner doesn't know exists, because they're not the ones using Copilot or ChatGPT to search for their own services.

At arosis, this is part of what we handle for clients: keeping Google Business Profile and Bing Places synced and consistent, alongside the structured data on your website, so that whichever AI tool a potential customer reaches for, they find accurate, up-to-date information about your business rather than an outdated listing or, worse, nothing at all.

So do I need both?

If your only presence is Google Business Profile, you're optimizing for Google's AI tools and missing Bing-powered ones like Copilot and parts of ChatGPT's search. Both listings are free to claim and maintain, so the real cost of skipping Bing Places isn't money — it's the ongoing effort of keeping two listings accurate and consistent instead of one. For most local service businesses, that's a small price for being findable across the full range of tools customers are starting to use instead of typing into a search bar.