Bing Webmaster Tools Now Shows When Copilot Cites Your Website

In our monthly measurement routine, we ask AI assistants a fixed set of questions and record what comes back. It works, but it is manual. Microsoft has now built a report that does part of that counting for you, and it is free. If your clients use Windows and Microsoft 365, they are likely to meet Copilot, so it is worth ten minutes.

What the AI Performance report is

In February 2026, Microsoft introduced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview. It reports how often your site is cited as a source, across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. According to Microsoft, it shows:

• total citations for your site
• the average number of pages cited
• the "grounding queries" the AI used when it fetched sources
• citation activity for individual pages
• visibility trends over time

A later update added intent and topic views, plus a measure called Citation Share, described in Microsoft's June announcement as the percentage of citations for the same grounding query that went to your site. In October, Microsoft announced a Topics Portfolio view in beta.

These features are previews or betas. Names, metrics and availability can change, so treat what you see as direction, not precise accounting.

Why a citation count is useful

A citation tells you which of your pages an AI system actually used, and for what question. That is information you cannot get from a ranking tool, because assistants publish no rankings. It lets you:

• see which pages are being trusted, and write more like them
• spot pages you expected to be cited that are not
• see the questions the system asked, which are often different from the ones you assumed

It will not tell you everything. It covers Microsoft's products, not ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, so it complements the manual routine and does not replace it.

How to set it up

1. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools at the Microsoft site and verify that you own it.

2. Find the AI Performance report in the tool and give it some time to collect data. A new site will not show history.

3. Check it monthly, at the same time as your manual prompt checks, and record the totals in the same spreadsheet.

4. Look at pages, not only totals. Which pages are cited, and do they match the pages you want people to land on?

You will need a login to the Microsoft tool and access to your website or DNS to verify ownership. If someone else manages your website, ask them to do the verification step rather than sharing passwords.

What IndexNow adds

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines when a page has been added, changed or removed, rather than waiting for them to find out. The IndexNow site lists support from Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. In the AI Performance announcement, Microsoft says IndexNow helps keep content fresh across search and AI experiences.

To use it, your site hosts a small key file, and your platform or developer submits changed URLs. Many content management systems have a way to do this, so ask your web developer whether yours does. It is a sensible low-cost step for pages that change, such as prices, opening hours or guidance that goes out of date.

What to keep in mind

• Microsoft says Bing respects robots.txt. The announcement states that Bing honours content owners' preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported controls. See our guide to which AI crawlers to allow or block before you change anything.
• Do not chase the number. Small local businesses will see small counts. The goal is the right pages being cited for the right questions, with accurate facts.
• Fix wrong claims at the source. If an AI answer gets your business wrong, correct the page or directory listing it probably learned from. We explain this in the measurement routine.
• Mind what you paste. Do not put client details into assistants while you test. The guidance in our AI security article applies.

For the wider picture, read AI search for small business, and compare it with what Google says about AI Overviews. If you want help setting up the reporting or checking that your site can be read, contact us, and see the Essential Eight for the security baseline that sits underneath.