@henk ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

One can speculate any number of reasons, but few can SAY what is going on.

How far back do your site logs go? Has Bing crawled at anytime in the past?

Just because one is crawled does NOT mean one will be "indexed" (shown in the serps). Reasons why can be geo location, content, UI, etc.

You bring an interesting view on crawling as most are concerned with g errors in indexing than Bing!

Are you seeing any Bing IP addresses showing for "human" UA log entries?

Sitemap is submitted and shows as fetched
. . .
It’s been months and still no crawling or indexing from Bing

Taken at face value, this would seem to mean that b has fetched the sitemap and nothing else. (Not even robots.txt?) I can't help suspecting some key fact has been left out.

So to add a bit more context:

- I bought the domain about 8 months ago, then I found out that it was listed on a lot of malicious website checks & anti virus scanner blacklists. (All removed from those lists now, manually requested to remove them)
- I can see the robots.txt can be found in Bing webmasters
- I can see the sitemap.xml can be found and is crawled

When I inspect the landing page <snip> I see this info:

- Discovered but not crawled URL cannot appear on Bing
- Discovered on 31 Dec 2024
- Crawl: The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation.

- If you think this URL should be indexed, click on Request indexing button. We will index it if we can fetch it and it adheres to Bing Webmaster guidelines

For other pages like for the page: /free-tools, I see:

- Discovered on 31 Mar 2025
- Discovered but not crawled
- URL cannot appear on Bing, + The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation.

- We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation.
- If you think this URL should be indexed, click on Request indexing button. We will index it if we can fetch it and it adheres to Bing Webmaster guidelines

Good to know: When I do a live url test for any page I see:

Tested on Today at 21:11
URL can be indexed by Bing
It can appear on Bing Search results given it passes quality checks and gets indexed by Bing

No SEO issues found

2 Markup types found

(I also checked Google Search Console, where everything is good and indexed, I checked the tabs:

Manual actions - No issues detected
Security issues - No issues detected)

I can also see in Cloudflare that it does seem to show crawler requests:

AI Crawlers Metrics: Jul 14 - Jul 15

Total requests 919
Allowed requests 919
Blocked requests 0

Crawler

BingBotMicrosoft Requests: 450
violations: None

GooglebotGoogle Requests: 213
violations: None

bought the domain about 8 months ago, then I found out that it was listed on a lot of malicious website checks & anti virus scanner blacklists

Might have to wait for Bing to see changes after disavowal requests. Escaping a bad rep is VERY DIFFICULT. Eight months of squeaky clean might not be enough to convince Bing, which is far more conservative than g, to show in the serps. Also there is the other fact that the content might not be desired/allowed.

That these responses appear means Bing can SEE your site, but something(s) are preventing them from indexing (adding to the serps) the site. Need to correct those issues first.

Okay, well thanks for responding!

Maybe I just have to wait it out a bit.

That extra detail about the domain’s past is important. If it spent time on any malware/phishing blacklists, even if you’ve cleaned it up and spotless, Bing almost certainly has it sitting in a “quarantine” or low-trust state.
Google tends to recover domains faster from bad history, but Bing is notoriously slow to re-score them - sometimes over a year before they’re fully out of the penalty box.

psst: I played hard with a bunch of AI tools over a year ago on some related sites (look in footers here;-) and I got myself put on that list a year ago. It is just now coming off those lists and getting a few referrals.