Bing Webmaster lets site owners set the crawl rate for each hour of the day (Crawl Control; API SaveCrawlSettings, 24 numbers); Bing calls this "input" to Bingbot on crawl rate and timing, and does not promise more crawling.

The dial I was looking for

My lab site is small. Bingbot visits regularly but takes only a handful of pages a day (the measurements are on the pw research pages). I wanted new pages to reach Bing sooner. Bingbot feeds the Bing index, and being fetched by a crawler is the first rung before any AI app can talk about you.

On 21 October 2026 I read the site's current crawl settings through the Bing Webmaster API. The same level for all 24 hours. The "Crawl Boost" option was not available for this site.

My first idea was simply to raise that level.

Bing says something else

Then I read more carefully. According to Bing's December 2018 blog post, read on 21 October 2026, Crawl Control lets site owners "provide input to the Bingbot about the crawl speed and timing" for their site. Bing's own example is asking Bingbot to crawl slowly during peak business hours and faster off-peak.

It is a tool for moving load around, not for asking for more visits.

You can do the same through the API. The `SaveCrawlSettings` reference on Microsoft Learn shows that you send an array of 24 numbers, one per hour.

What I could not find was an official scale. Plenty of guides say it runs from 1 to 10 with a default of 5, but they are all third-party. Bing's own Crawl Control help page returned a 404 when I looked on 21 October 2026.

So I changed my plan

For a site as small as mine, crawl rate is probably not the bottleneck, and Bing has never said a higher rate gets new URLs discovered sooner.

I still intend to raise it. Not because I expect it to help, but to rule that idea out with numbers. Raising it and lowering it again costs next to nothing.

For owners in Japan

Every shop has its own busy hours, and they are Tokyo hours, not the hours of Bing's servers. That is where Crawl Control genuinely helps.

1. If your server struggles at peak times, use Crawl Control to shift crawling to quieter hours. That is what it was built for.
2. Do not expect a higher rate to get new pages into Bing faster. No Bing documentation promises that.
3. If your robots.txt has a Crawl-delay line, secondary sources say it overrides Crawl Control. Check robots.txt before you change anything.

How sure is this

This is an external-source claim, based on a 2018 blog post and Microsoft's API reference; I have not run the experiment yet. The limits section below names the two gaps: nothing from Bing links crawl rate to faster discovery of new URLs, and the 1–10 scale has no official source.