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Bing retired its legacy webmaster APIs: check the integrations
Bing retired the SOAP and POX Webmaster APIs on 31 August 2026. Check old reporting and submission jobs, then verify their JSON replacements return usable data.
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If a Bing report stopped updating at the start of September, check the integration before interpreting the chart. Microsoft retired the legacy SOAP and POX versions of its Webmaster API on 31 August 2026. Programs using those endpoints need the supported replacement.
What happened (added 19 September 2026): The SOAP and POX endpoints were retired on 31 August 2026, as Search Engine Watch reported. The checks below now apply to integrations that may already have stopped working.
Which systems are affected
The API lets software retrieve Bing Webmaster data or submit requests without using the dashboard manually. SOAP and POX are the older XML-based interfaces. An agency might still use them in a scheduled export, a URL-submission job or a script feeding a client spreadsheet.
Look for /webmaster/api.svc/soap and /webmaster/api.svc/pox/ in code and configuration. Also check SDKs, shared libraries and vendor integrations: an address may be assembled at runtime rather than written as one searchable string.
The retirement concerns those API protocols. It does not mean the Bing Webmaster Tools website or the separate IndexNow protocol has been retired. Microsoft’s protocol documentation and getting-started guide are the starting points for the supported interface.
A migration needs more than a new URL
An XML response and a JSON response have different structures. Update the request and the code that reads the result, including error handling. A job that runs without crashing can still write empty values if its parser expects the old format.
Test with a known site and a date range that contains data. Check that the expected fields arrive, that the stored result is correct and that a failed request produces an alert rather than a plausible-looking blank chart.
Where a vendor owns the connection, ask whether the migration is complete and how it was verified. You do not need to rewrite their integration, but you do need to know whether its data is current.
Check the reports that used the old connection
Inspect the first scheduled runs after 31 August. Look for missing dates, repeated values and exports that unexpectedly contain zero rows. Compare a sample with the dashboard before sending the next client report.
This is also a useful time to document ownership: which job reads the data, who maintains it, and how a failure is noticed. The fix is incomplete if the connection works again but the next failure can remain invisible for weeks.
