Bing's AI Performance report: how to see where Copilot cites your website

Bing Webmaster Tools now has a report that shows when Microsoft Copilot cites your website in its answers, which of your pages it uses, and the phrases it searched for to find them. It is free, and it comes from Microsoft itself rather than from a third-party tool estimating it. It is the only report we know of in which an AI provider shows site owners its own citation data. If your site is not in Bing at all yet, start with getting your business on Bing.

This guide covers how to get into it, what each part of the report means, what it cannot tell you, and a short routine for checking it each month. Everything about how the report works is taken from Microsoft's own AI Performance help page and its announcement of the June 2026 additions.

Why Bing matters for AI answers

Microsoft says Copilot sends search queries to Bing to ground its answers in web data, and Bing's webmaster guidelines now describe how content is selected for Bing search, Copilot and "grounding" results together, on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation. In other words, how Bing sees your site shapes whether Copilot can cite it. The AI Performance report is where you can see the result.

Step one: get your site into Bing Webmaster Tools

If you have not used it before:

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in.
2. Add your site. Microsoft's help on adding a site offers two routes: import from Google Search Console, which brings your verified sites across and verifies them automatically, or add it manually and prove ownership with one of four verification methods.
3. Submit your sitemap if the import did not bring it across.
4. Wait. Microsoft says it usually takes about 48 hours for data to appear.

Step two: open the report

Once your site is in, choose it from the site list and open AI Performance from the left-hand menu of Bing Webmaster Tools. It sits alongside Search Performance, URL Inspection and the other reports.

Set the date range at the top. Microsoft offers 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, or a custom range within the history available.

What each part of the report means

The headline figures

• Total citations: how many times your content was visibly referenced or shown as a source in AI-generated answers in the date range.
• Cited pages: the number of different pages from your site cited on a given day.
• Average cited pages: the average number of different pages cited per day over the range.

Microsoft is explicit that these measure citation activity only, not rankings, authority or importance.

The timeline

A chart of citation volume over time. Microsoft notes that changes can reflect the questions people are asking, updates to your content, or changes to the AI systems themselves, and that the trends cannot be attributed to any single cause.

Grounding queries

This is the most useful part. Each row is a short phrase the AI used when it retrieved content from your site that was then cited. They are grouped phrases, not the actual questions people typed, and one phrase can relate to several of your pages. The number beside each phrase shows how often your content was cited for it.

Read them as a map of what Copilot thinks your site is good for.

Pages

The pages on your site cited most often. Select a grounding query to see which pages were cited for it, or select a page to see the grounding queries that led to it. You can only filter by one at a time; exports follow whatever filter you have applied.

Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare (preview)

Microsoft added four features in June 2026, in preview:

• Intents labels grounding queries by the kind of question, such as Informational, Commercial, Comparison, Local, Research or Learn and Solve. The labels are assigned by machine-learning classifiers, and Microsoft says they will not always match how you would describe a query.
• Topics groups related grounding queries into broader themes.
• Citation Share shows your site's share of all citations shown for a specific grounding query. It does not reveal which other sites were cited.
• Compare overlays a previous period on the chart, so you can see change over time.

What the report cannot tell you

It is worth being clear about the limits, all of which Microsoft states itself:

• It covers the AI experiences Microsoft lists: Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Microsoft does not name the partners, so treat it as a view of Microsoft's AI answers, not of every assistant.
• Citations are not visits. A citation means your content was shown as a source, not that anyone clicked.
• It is a sample. The data is aggregated and sampled, very low activity may not appear, and totals can differ between views.
• It shows what, not why. It does not show individual answers, the exact prompts, or why a page was chosen.
• An empty report is not a penalty. Microsoft says sparse citation activity may simply not surface.

A fifteen-minute monthly routine

Once a month, on the same day:

1. Set the range to 30 days and turn on Compare against the previous 30 days.
2. Note the headline numbers: total citations and average cited pages, up or down.
3. Open Grounding queries. Look for the phrases that describe what you sell. Are they there? Are they growing? For assistants that publish no report like this, an hour of asking them directly is the nearest equivalent.
4. Open Pages. Are your most important pages, such as your service and pricing pages, being cited, or only older articles?
5. Select your most important page and look at the grounding queries it appears for. Do they match what the page is meant to answer? If not, the page may need to answer its question more directly.
6. Check Intents, if you have it. Are you being cited for Commercial, Comparison or Local questions, the ones closest to someone choosing a supplier, or only for general information?
7. Check Citation Share for two or three phrases that matter most.
8. Export the data. Microsoft offers CSV and Excel exports. History in the dashboard is limited, so keeping a monthly export builds your own record.
9. Write down one thing to do, for example updating a page that is cited for the wrong phrase, or adding a clear answer to a question you are not cited for.

What to do with what you find

Microsoft's own suggestions on the help page are sensible and match its webmaster guidelines:

• Align content with what people ask. If you are cited for phrases you do not care about and not for ones you do, the pages for the ones you care about need to answer them more clearly.
• Put the key information near the top, with descriptive headings, tables and questions and answers.
• Support claims with evidence: examples, data and sources.
• Keep pages accurate and up to date, and tell Bing when they change using IndexNow.
• Name your business, people and services the same way everywhere.
• Keep each page to one topic.

None of this is a trick. It is the same work that makes a page useful to a person, which is why it tends to help in every search engine and assistant at once.

Reading grounding queries: a worked approach

The grounding queries list is most useful when you sort it into three piles, once a quarter:

1. Phrases that match what you sell. These are working. Check the page cited for each is the right one, the page you would want a customer to land on. If Copilot is citing an old blog post rather than your service page, make the service page answer the question more clearly and link to it from the post.
2. Phrases near what you sell. Adjacent topics your content is being used for. These are often the easiest gains: a clearer answer, a short section added to an existing page, or a new page on the exact question.
3. Phrases that have nothing to do with your business. Usually harmless. Occasionally they reveal a page that confuses what you do, which is worth tidying.

Then note the phrases that are missing: the questions your customers ask that do not appear at all. Those are the gaps for your content plan, and they are worth checking against the Keyword Research tool in the same account, which shows what people search on Bing.

Microsoft's own guidance on this is modest, and it is right to be: the data is sampled, it shows what happened rather than why, and changes after an update cannot be attributed with certainty. Treat the report as a direction finder, not a scoreboard.

Keeping your own record

Because the dashboard only keeps limited history, a simple monthly log helps:

Fill in one row each month from your export. After six months you will have a clearer picture of what moves citations for your site than any single view of the dashboard can give.

Where it fits with your other reports

Use it alongside the others, not instead of them:

If you would like help reading it, or acting on it, that is part of our AI search visibility service. For the wider picture of getting found in Bing, see how to get your business on Bing, Bing Maps and Copilot.