Set Up Bing Notifications for News Updates on Specific Topics

Bing still pushes breaking-news alerts in 2026, but nearly every older walkthrough on the web is wrong about where the settings live. Microsoft retired the email-only Bing Alerts product in 2022 and shut down the news.live.com dashboard in early 2024. The current flow is split between the Microsoft account notification panel and the Bing mobile app — and once both are set up correctly, you will get pushes for any topic, company, sports team, or publisher within a few minutes of a story going live.

This guide walks through every step that still works as of April 2026, flags the quiet defaults that break alerts for most readers, and covers what replaced the features that no longer exist.

What Bing Notifications Actually Deliver in 2026

There are four active notification streams: breaking-news headlines for topics you follow, personalized “For you” digests that blend your follows with reading history, sports score updates for tracked teams and leagues, and weather alerts for saved locations. Stock-watchlist alerts still originate in the Bing app but now flow through Copilot Finance, which is why some readers see a second permission prompt the first time they tap a ticker.

Keyword-to-email alerts are not on this list. That product is gone and Microsoft has not signaled plans to bring it back. If you specifically want custom keywords delivered by email, use Google Alerts — it indexes the same publishers Bing does and the format hasn’t changed meaningfully since 2016.

Step 1: Sign In With a Microsoft Account

Use a personal Microsoft account (Outlook, Hotmail, or Live). Microsoft sends confirmation codes to the email on file, and your followed topics sync across every device signed in with that account, so pick one you plan to keep long-term.

Work and school accounts (Azure AD / Entra) will let you sign in but almost never deliver pushes. Tenant admins routinely block consumer Bing push traffic, which means the toggles in Step 2 look correct while nothing actually arrives. If you only have a work account, create a free personal one at account.microsoft.com and use that for news alerts specifically.

Step 2: Open Your Notification Settings

Go to account.microsoft.com/notifications while signed in. The settings are grouped into categories: Account & security, Microsoft Rewards, Shopping, News, and Sports. Expand News and turn on Breaking news from Bing — this is the master switch. If it is off, nothing in this guide fires regardless of what you do in the app.

Below the master switch sits a Topics list. Click Add a topic and start typing a company, person, product, team, or keyword such as “Galaxy S26” or “Ryobi 18V.” Microsoft resolves what you type against its Knowledge Graph, so you pick from a dropdown of recognized entities rather than typing raw strings. That change (which arrived with the 2024 overhaul) reduces false positives but means truly obscure keywords cannot be followed here — for those, use the RSS workaround in the last section of this guide.

Step 3: Install the Bing Mobile App on Android

The web settings cover email and browser push only. Mobile notifications require the app. Install Microsoft Bing: Chat with AI from the Play Store (package name com.microsoft.bing), open it, tap the profile icon, and sign in with the same Microsoft account. Followed topics sync down within about a minute.

On first launch the app asks for notification permission. Accept it. If you dismissed it by mistake, open Android Settings → Apps → Bing → Notifications and turn Allow notifications back on. The iPhone version exists but is several releases behind on the notification channel model, so this guide focuses on Android where the feature parity is current.

Step 4: Tune Android Notification Channels

Inside Android Settings → Apps → Bing → Notifications, Bing exposes separate channels: Breaking news, Daily digest, Sports, Weather alerts, and App updates. Leave the top four on. Turn the App updates channel off — that is the channel that delivers promotional pushes about new Bing features, and it is the single most common reason readers disable Bing notifications entirely after a week.

Set Breaking news to Alerting (sound + vibration). Everything else works fine on Silent unless you specifically want sports scores to buzz.

Step 5: Configure the Edge Browser for Desktop Alerts

Desktop push rides on Microsoft Edge, not the Windows Action Center directly. Open Edge, navigate to edge://settings/content/notifications, and make sure Ask before sending is enabled. Then visit bing.com, sign in, and accept the notification prompt that appears along the top of the page. If you previously blocked it, click the lock icon in the address bar, change Notifications to Allow, and reload.

Chrome, Firefox, and Safari work for sign-in and follow-syncing but receive only plain-banner alerts — the rich preview cards that include thumbnail, outlet logo, and a snippet are Edge-only by design.

Step 6: Fine-Tune How Often Alerts Arrive

Inside the Bing app, tap Profile → Settings → Notifications. The Frequency slider has three positions: High (every breaking story for followed topics), Medium (major developments only, roughly 2–5 per day), and Low (a single daily digest).

Medium became the default during a late-2025 app update, down from High. That silent change is the single biggest reason people report that “Bing notifications stopped working” — they are arriving exactly as configured, just at a lower volume than before. Flip it to High if you want the old behavior back.

The Quiet hours toggle just below is a server-side rule, so it applies to every signed-in device at once. Useful if your laptop would otherwise buzz at 3 a.m. while your phone is on Do Not Disturb.

Troubleshooting: Alerts Not Arriving

Work through these in order. They solve the issue for roughly 80% of readers before anything more invasive is needed.

1. Confirm the master switch is on at account.microsoft.com/notifications. It silently resets after some account security events (password change, new device sign-in from a new country).
2. Check that you are signed into the Bing app with the same account that holds your topic follows. Switching to a secondary account is a common cause because the app caches the last-used account across reinstalls.
3. Verify the Android notification channels haven’t been changed by Android’s adaptive notifications feature, which aggressively silences channels with low tap-through rates. Turn Adaptive notifications off under Settings → Notifications → Advanced if this keeps happening.
4. Battery optimization will also kill background push. Go to Settings → Apps → Bing → Battery → Unrestricted. Samsung phones additionally require pinning the app in Device care → Battery → Background usage limits → Never sleeping apps.
5. Reinstall the app if alerts worked and then stopped without any setting change on your end. Android sometimes holds a stale notification permission state across Bing updates, and a reinstall is faster than isolating which service cached it.

If the app is actively crashing rather than just silent, Microsoft’s consumer support line is 1-800-642-7676. Have the Microsoft account email ready — first-line support gates troubleshooting on account verification.

Turning Bing Alerts Off

To silence all alerts at once, disable Breaking news from Bing at account.microsoft.com/notifications. That turns off pushes for every device signed in with the account. To drop a single topic, open the Bing app → Following, long-press the topic, and choose Unfollow. To mute Bing on one phone only while leaving your account-level follows intact, open Android Settings → Apps → Bing → Notifications and flip Allow notifications off — the follow list is preserved and you can re-enable on that device at any time.

What Replaced the Old Bing Alerts

If you arrived here looking for the products most older guides reference, here is what happened to them:

• Bing Alerts email subscriptions — no longer available. Retired by Microsoft in 2022. No direct replacement for custom keyword-to-email.
• The news.live.com dashboard — no longer available. Subdomain taken down in early 2024. The topic-follow flow in Step 2 above is the closest modern equivalent.
• Legacy RSS at api.bing.com/rss.aspx — retired in 2023. The current replacement is bing.com/news/search with the format=rss query parameter, which still works in feed readers for keyword-level monitoring.

For custom keyword-to-email monitoring, Google Alerts remains the best free option and indexes Bing-indexed sources in addition to Google’s own. As of April 2026, Microsoft’s public roadmap ties future Bing notification changes to the Copilot personalization engine rather than any standalone alerts product, so the flow in this guide is likely to be the shape of things through 2027.