Bing Doesn't Do Manual Penalties: It Builds Algorithms Instead

On July 10, 2026, Krishna Madhavan, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, confirmed publicly that Bing does not issue one-off indexing or ranking penalties against individual sites. According to a Search Engine Roundtable report, Madhavan stated plainly on X: "we do not do one offs....not scalable...." The comment came after SEO researchers Glenn Gabe and Lily Ray flagged a site that had been spamming the Bing index with black hat SEO tactics, and apparently ranking well in ChatGPT as a result.

Rather than targeting a single bad actor, Bing's approach is to identify the type of spam involved, build an algorithm to detect it at scale, and then apply that algorithm across the entire index. Every site doing the same thing gets caught, not just the one that got reported.

What Actually Happened

It started when Glenn Gabe flagged a site that had been surging in ChatGPT, apparently without any meaningful Google visibility, and traced the source back to strong Bing rankings. Lily Ray spotted it too. According to Gabe's post on July 10, the site had close to 90,000 URLs indexed in Bing. Then, practically overnight, it was completely deindexed. Gone.

Madhavan had been tagged by both Gabe and Ray, and he responded that his team would take a look. Shortly after, the site was wiped from the Bing index, and Madhavan confirmed action had been taken, but clarified that the enforcement was not a one-off manual penalty.

The implication is important: Bing didn't just kill one spammy site. It built, or triggered, a spam-detection algorithm capable of catching every similar site in the index. The individual site just happened to be the one that surfaced the pattern.

Why This Matters for SEO

Here's where a lot of marketers get their mental model of search enforcement wrong. They picture a manual reviewer at a desk, looking at one bad site, clicking a button, and moving on. That's not how modern search works at scale, and Bing just said so out loud.

Think about what this means if you're running a multi-site operation or managing a portfolio of client sites. If one of those sites is using a tactic that Bing decides to algorithmically address, you won't just see one property get hit. Every site using a similar pattern could get swept up in the same enforcement wave.

I've watched this same dynamic play out on the Google side for years. When Google rolled out its scaled content abuse enforcement with the March 2024 core and spam updates, it wasn't surgical; it was a broad-side hit that caught a lot of sites doing similar things, even sites that thought they were operating in a gray zone. Bing is describing exactly the same philosophy.

There's a second angle here that deserves attention. This story surfaced because of what appeared to be a connection between Bing rankings and ChatGPT visibility. The Search Engine Roundtable report notes that the spammy site was "doing well in ChatGPT as a result" of its Bing performance. That relationship, Bing as a data source feeding AI-generated answers, is increasingly important. If your SEO strategy ignores Bing entirely, you may be leaving AI citation surface area on the table.

How to Audit Your Bing Presence for Indexing Penalties

This story is a good forcing function to audit your Bing presence, both for compliance and for opportunity. Here's where to start.

1. Audit your Bing index. Log into Bing Webmaster Tools and check your indexed URL count. If it looks inflated (especially if you have thin, duplicate, or auto-generated pages crawled) that's the kind of pattern that could draw algorithmic attention.
2. Review any AI-generated content at scale. If you've been using AI to produce high-volume content for Bing rankings specifically, check whether it passes a basic quality and originality bar. If Bing builds an algorithm to catch a tactic like this, it won't stop at one site.
3. Watch your Bing visibility alongside Google. If you're only tracking Google rankings, you have a blind spot. Bing is a real source of referral traffic and, increasingly, a data source for ChatGPT answers. Both are worth monitoring.
4. Check your link profile for Bing-specific patterns. Bing's spam filters may not treat every link-building tactic the same way Google does. A fresh link audit with Bing in mind is worth the time.
5. Don't assume a clean Google record means you're safe in Bing. The two engines are running different algorithms with different enforcement thresholds. A site in good standing with Google can still have indexing or spam issues on Bing.

Why Bing's Index Matters More as AI Search Grows

Bing has historically been treated as an afterthought in SEO strategy conversations. That's been a mistake for a while, and it's becoming a bigger one as AI-powered search products pull from Bing's index. ChatGPT's use of Bing for web search has made Bing's data quality more consequential than it was in the pure blue-link era.

Madhavan's public transparency here is also notable. Bing rarely communicates about its enforcement mechanisms in this much detail. The fact that he jumped into a thread flagged by two prominent SEO researchers (acknowledged the issue quickly, confirmed action was taken, and then explained the philosophy behind it) is a level of communication that the SEO community often wishes Google would match.

And yes, it's worth knowing: according to the Search Engine Roundtable report, Bing has been known to email sites when they're no longer blocked by Bing Search. That kind of notification, even if automated, is a useful signal for site owners.

The broader trend here is clear. Search engines are moving away from bespoke, case-by-case enforcement toward pattern-recognition at scale. If your SEO relies on tactics that work right up to the edge of a policy, the risk isn't just one site going down; it's an algorithm finding every site using that same playbook. Build for quality that holds up across any engine, and you don't have to worry about which one builds the next spam filter.

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