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

Bing will now tell you, for free, whether Microsoft's Copilot ever mentions your business. Its AI Performance report shows when Copilot cites your website, which of your pages it uses, and the phrases it searched with to find them. It's Microsoft's own data rather than a third-party tool's guess, and fifteen minutes a month is enough to use it well. If your site isn't in Bing at all yet, getting your business on Bing comes first.

Why Bing matters for AI answers

Microsoft says Copilot sends search queries to Bing to check its answers against current web pages, which the industry calls grounding. Bing's webmaster guidelines now describe how content is chosen for Bing search, for Copilot and for grounding together, on the same foundation of crawling, indexing and ranking. So how Bing sees your site decides whether Copilot can cite it, and the AI Performance report is where you see the result.

Step one: get your site into Bing Webmaster Tools

If you've never used it:

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 you own it with one of four verification methods.
3. Submit your sitemap, the list of your pages, if the import didn't bring it across.
4. Wait about 48 hours, which Microsoft says is how long data usually takes to appear.

Step two: open the report

Once your site is in, pick it from the site list and open AI Performance in the left-hand menu of Bing Webmaster Tools, alongside Search Performance, URL Inspection and the rest. Then set the date range at the top: Microsoft offers 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, or a range of your own within the history it holds.

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 an AI answer during the date range.
• Cited pages: how many different pages from your site were 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 count citations and nothing else: not rankings, not authority and not importance.

The timeline

This charts your citations over time. Microsoft says a change in it can reflect the questions people are asking, something you changed on your site, or a change to the AI systems themselves, and that you can't put a trend down to any single cause.

Grounding queries

This is the most useful part of the report. Each row is a short phrase Copilot searched with when it found a page of yours that it then cited. The phrases are grouped, rather than being the actual questions people typed, and one phrase can relate to several of your pages. The number beside each one shows how often your content was cited for it. Read the list as a map of what Copilot thinks your site is good for.

Pages

This lists the pages on your site that are cited most often. Select a grounding query to see which pages were cited for it, or select a page to see the queries that led to it. You can only filter by one of the two at a time, and an export follows whichever filter you've applied.

Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare (preview)

Microsoft added four features in June 2026, all in preview:

• Intents labels each grounding query by the kind of question it is: Informational, Commercial, Comparison, Local, Research, or Learn and Solve. Software assigns the labels, and Microsoft says they won't always match how you'd describe a query yourself.
• Topics groups related grounding queries into broader themes.
• Citation Share shows your site's share of all the citations given for one grounding query. It doesn't tell you which other sites were cited.
• Compare lays a previous period over the chart, so you can see how things have changed.

What the report can't tell you

Microsoft is upfront about the limits:

• It covers only the AI products Microsoft lists: Copilot, AI summaries in Bing, and selected partner integrations. Microsoft doesn't name the partners, so read it as a view of Microsoft's AI answers rather than of every assistant.
• Citations aren't visits. A citation means your content was shown as a source, not that anyone clicked.
• It's a sample. The data is grouped and sampled, very low activity may not show at all, and totals can differ from one view to another.
• It shows what, not why. You don't see individual answers, the exact questions people asked, or why a page was picked.
• An empty report isn't a penalty. Microsoft says very sparse citation activity may simply not show up.

So treat the report as something that points you in a direction, not as a score.

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, and whether each went up or down.
3. Open Grounding queries and look for the phrases that describe what you sell. Are they there, and are they growing?
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 the two or three phrases that matter most.
8. Export the data. Microsoft offers CSV and Excel exports, and the dashboard keeps only limited history, so a monthly export builds you the record it can't.
9. Write down one thing to do, such as updating a page that's cited for the wrong phrase, or adding a clear answer to a question you're never cited for.

No other assistant publishes a report like this one. For the rest, an hour of asking them directly is the nearest you'll get.

What to do with what you find

Microsoft's own suggestions on the help page are sensible, and they match its webmaster guidelines: put the key information near the top of a page, under descriptive headings; back up claims with examples, data and sources; keep pages accurate, and tell Bing when they change through IndexNow, which lets you tell it straight away; name your business, your people and your services the same way everywhere; and keep each page to one topic. None of that is a trick. It's the same work that makes a page useful to a person, which is why it tends to help with every search engine and assistant at once.

The grounding queries are where you decide what to act on. Once a quarter, sort them into three piles:

1. Phrases that match what you sell. These are working. Check that the page cited for each one is the page you'd 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. These are the neighbouring topics your content is being used for, and they're usually the easiest gains: a clearer answer, a short section added to a page you already have, or a new page on the exact question.
3. Phrases that have nothing to do with your business. These are mostly harmless. Now and then one points to a page that's confusing people about what you do, and that page is worth tidying up.

Then write down the phrases that are missing: the questions your customers ask that never appear at all. Those are the gaps for your content plan, and it's worth checking them against the Keyword Research tool in the same account, which shows what people search for on Bing.

Keeping your own record

The dashboard keeps only limited history, so a simple monthly log is worth the two minutes it takes:

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

Where it fits with your other reports

Use it alongside the others, not instead of them:

If you'd rather someone read the report and acted on it for you, that's part of our AI search visibility service.