Bing and Apple Maps: The Listings You’ve Forgotten

Most local businesses I talk to have had a go at their Google Business Profile. Maybe not finished it, but they’ve claimed it, stuck a photo on, tidied up the hours. Good. That’s the big one, and if you’ve done that you’re already ahead of plenty of your competition.

Then I ask about Bing and Apple Maps and I get a look. Sometimes a little laugh. “Does anyone actually use Bing?”

Fair question. Bing has been the punchline of search engines for about fifteen years. But the honest answer in 2026 is more interesting than it used to be, and oddly enough it isn’t really about Bing at all.

Apple Maps is on half the phones in the country

Here’s the thing about iPhones. Tap an address in a text message or an email and it opens Apple Maps. Not Google. Ask Siri for the nearest garden centre and you get Apple Maps. Roughly half the phones in the UK are iPhones, so that’s an awful lot of people being handed a map you might not be properly listed on.

And here’s the bit that actually stings. If you’ve never claimed your listing, Apple has most likely already built one for you from other data sources. Which means your opening hours, your phone number, even the pin on the map, could be wrong, years out of date, or sat in the wrong place entirely. I once found a business near Bottesford whose pin was in the middle of a paddock two fields away. Nobody had ever told them, because who thinks to check Apple Maps for their own shop.

Claiming it is free. It used to be called Apple Business Connect, and since April this year it’s just Apple Business. You sign in with an Apple ID, find your business, prove you’re actually you, then fix the details and add a few decent photos. Half an hour, honestly.

Bing is the back door into AI search

Now Bing. Almost nobody in Aslockton is sitting down and choosing Bing over Google. That’s not why it matters.

Bing is the search index behind Microsoft Copilot, and a sizeable chunk of what ChatGPT tells people when it goes off and searches the web comes from Bing too. So when someone types “reliable plumber near Bingham” into ChatGPT instead of Google, which more and more people are doing, Bing’s picture of your business is part of what shapes the answer they get.

That’s the real shift. Bing quietly stopped being a search engine you could ignore and turned into plumbing for the AI tools everyone’s suddenly using. Bing Places for Business is still free, still takes about twenty minutes, and it’ll import most of your details straight from your Google profile so you’re not typing everything out twice.

What to get right when you do it

Same rules as Google, really. Nothing clever.

Use exactly the same business name, address and phone number you use everywhere else. Not “Ltd” in one place and nothing in another, not an old mobile number lurking on Bing from 2019. Search engines and AI tools are trying to work out whether three listings are one business or three, and matching details is how they decide. I wrote about that in more detail in the post on why your name, address and phone must match everywhere, and it applies here just as much.

Pick the most specific category you can. Add real photos, not stock ones. Put your proper opening hours in, including the awkward ones like early closing or bank holidays. And write the description like a person, saying what you do and roughly where you cover, so “we cover Whatton, Bingham and the villages across the Vale of Belvoir” rather than a list of keywords nobody would ever say out loud.

Is it worth the hour?

I want to be straight with you. Claiming these two listings is not going to transform your week. You won’t wake up on Thursday to a flood of new enquiries from Newark and Cropwell Bishop because you filled in a Bing form on Tuesday.

What it does is stop you leaking customers in the places you’re not looking. The iPhone user who follows a wrong pin and gives up. The person asking ChatGPT for a recommendation and getting your competitor because your details were thin. Nobody can promise you rankings, and results vary hugely depending on your trade and how busy your area is. But these are small, free, one-off jobs that keep working quietly in the background for years, and there aren’t many of those in marketing.

Do Google first. It’s still where most of your customers are. Then when you’ve got a spare hour on a rainy afternoon, do Apple, then do Bing, and put it out of your mind.

If you’d rather someone just checked what’s out there with your name on it, message me for a free visibility check. I’ll look you up the way a real customer would, across Google, Bing and the AI assistants, and send you a plain one-page report on what I find.