Bing indexing app content for use in search results, suggests markup that links webpages with corresponding app content, actions on that content
Make Apps Stand Out in Search with App Linking — You've focused your energy on optimizing your website to get traffic from search engines.
Context & Ripple Effects
Bing is entering the app-indexing race months after Google began indexing iOS 9 apps with deep links, a gap Microsoft had left open while rivals moved first. The pitch to developers is familiar: keep optimizing your site, but add markup so Bing can tie each webpage to its in-app counterpart and surface app actions directly in results.
Facebook has already shown where the demand sits, using Google App Indexing to pull search visitors into its own app. Bing's answer arrives just before its iPhone redesign built around deep links, making app indexing the plumbing for a broader mobile-app push.
First-order effects
- Publishers and app developers get a new optimization surface: adding app-linking markup makes their app content and actions eligible to appear in Bing results alongside — or instead of — their webpages.
- Microsoft closes a feature parity gap with Google at a moment when Google's index already covers iOS apps and Facebook funnels search traffic into its app through that same mechanism.
Second-order effects
- Developers face pressure to maintain deep-link markup for multiple engines rather than one, raising the cost of app discoverability but rewarding whoever invests early as Bing's iPhone redesign leans harder on deep links.
- The browser-to-app boundary becomes contested territory: if results increasingly open native apps, the mobile web loses clicks, which is the same tension Bing later addressed on the web side by rolling out AMP support for mobile searches.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search engines stop being lists of blue links and become routers between web and native app destinations — a structural shift toward whichever player indexes both surfaces most completely, with publishers' markup choices deciding visibility.
- App indexing also sets up the aggregator layer: once engines can pull structured app content into results, features like Bing spotlight's editor-and-AI compiled news show where that indexed material gets repackaged.
The trend: Search is shifting from pointing at webpages to indexing and routing users straight into native apps, with Google and Bing competing on whose deep-link index covers more app content.