Bing does not flag one spammy site and act on it alone. According to Krishna Madhavan, who works as Microsoft Bing’s principal product manager, the company instead studies the pattern behind a spam technique, converts it into a detection algorithm, and runs that algorithm across the entire index to catch every site doing the same thing. Madhavan stated the policy directly on X: “we do not do one offs…not scalable…”
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz, who first reported the comment on July 13, traced it back to a specific case. SEO analysts Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray had flagged a site pulling in heavy ChatGPT traffic while showing almost no visibility on Google, a gap Gabe attributed to the site’s outsized Bing rankings feeding ChatGPT’s answers. Gabe reported that the site, which had nearly 90,000 URLs indexed, was fully removed from Bing’s index within days of being flagged. Madhavan replied to Ray on July 8 to say Bing would look into it, then confirmed on July 10 that the deindexing had happened, framing it as proof the team acts on reports rather than sitting on them.
That enforcement model creates a real gap with Google. A Google manual action targets one property, gets logged in Search Console with a stated reason, and gives the site owner a formal reconsideration request once the issue is fixed. Bing’s approach, as Madhavan frames it, skips that individual accounting: a site does not get flagged and notified so much as it gets caught in whatever net the algorithm just became.
That difference changes how a drop gets diagnosed. A site owner watching Google traffic fall can check Search Console for a manual action and know, within minutes, whether a human reviewer targeted the site specifically. A site owner watching Bing traffic fall has no equivalent report to check and no reconsideration form to file. Schwartz noted separately that Bing has been observed emailing sites once they are no longer blocked from search, a recovery notice rather than a penalty notice, and one that may itself be automated.
The practical shift is in where the diagnostic work happens. A Bing-specific drop is less a question of what one page did wrong and more a question of what pattern Bing’s index-wide algorithm is now matching. Sites that lost Bing visibility in the same window as Gabe and Ray’s flagged case are a useful signal on their own: whatever technique that site used is now being scored across the index, not just against one URL.
Operators who depend on Bing traffic, including traffic routed through ChatGPT’s Bing-sourced results, should audit their own content against known spam patterns now, rather than wait for a notice that Bing’s model was not built to send.
Reported by Barry Schwartz for Search Engine Roundtable on July 13, 2026, based on statements Krishna Madhavan posted to X on July 8 and July 10.
