Bing Copilot Citations: How to Get Into Copilot Answers

Copilot is the AI assistant almost nobody optimises for, and Microsoft is the only platform that will show you exactly why you should. While Google’s new Search Console report stops at impressions, Bing Webmaster Tools has been reporting actual citations since February 2026: which of your pages Copilot quoted, how often, and for what queries. I check it before I check anything Google gives me, because it answers questions Google’s report refuses to.

The audience argument is thinner, and I’ll make it honestly. On StatCounter’s measure of worldwide AI chatbot usage, Copilot held 2.79% in August 2026, far behind ChatGPT. The case for caring anyway is who that slice is: Copilot ships inside Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365, which means its users disproportionately sit at work, inside companies that standardised on Microsoft. If you sell to businesses, the smallest assistant may hold your most valuable readers.

What the AI Performance report gives you that Google won’t

The report, under Search performance → AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, went into public preview on February 10, 2026 and covers Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI-generated summaries and select partner integrations. Four numbers do the work:

• Total citations - how often your content appeared as a source in AI answers.
• Cited pages - which URLs are being referenced, per day.
• Grounding queries - the phrases the AI generated internally when it went looking for sources. These are not what the user typed. They are what the model decided the user meant, which makes them stranger and more useful than any keyword report.
• Page-level trends - citation activity per URL over time.

Set that against what Google shipped in Search Console, which is impressions with no clicks and no queries, and the difference is stark: Microsoft tells you the query and confirms the citation. Google tells you a link was rendered somewhere near an answer.

In June 2026 Microsoft added four more views: Intents (grounding queries classified as informational, commercial, navigational and so on), Topics (queries clustered into subject areas), Compare (this 30 days against the last), and the one I’d single out, Citation Share - the percentage of all citations for a grounding query that went to your site. Microsoft frames it as observational rather than a scoreboard, but a share number per query is as close to “AI market share” as any platform currently reports.

Read the grounding queries first

Open the report and go straight to grounding queries, because they hold the finding that changes behaviour. The queries Copilot generates rarely match the keywords you targeted. A page I’d file under one keyword gets retrieved for reworded, adjacent, sometimes oddly specific phrasings, and the gap between what you optimised for and what the model retrieves you for is the most actionable list in the whole tool.

Three things to do with them:

1. Map queries to pages. The report shows which pages get cited for which grounding query. A query landing on the wrong page - a blog post where your product page should be - is a signal to strengthen the right page’s claim on that phrasing.
2. Mine them for headings. A grounding query is the model telling you, in its own words, what question your content answers. Promote the recurring ones into h2s, and answer them in the first two sentences underneath.
3. Watch Citation Share on the queries that matter commercially. Share moving from 8% to 20% on a buying-intent query is worth more than total citations doubling on informational ones, and the Intents view exists to make that split visible.

Getting cited more: the unglamorous prerequisites

Copilot’s report lives inside Bing Webmaster Tools for a reason: what it cites, it first has to index. Before any content tactics, the plumbing:

• Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Most teams did this for Google a decade ago and never for Bing. The AI Performance report is empty until you do.
• Don’t block bingbot. I’ve seen robots.txt files that allow Googlebot and casually disallow everything else. That setting used to cost you a search engine you’d stopped thinking about. It now costs you an AI channel.
• Use IndexNow for anything that changes. Bing’s push protocol tells the index about new and updated URLs immediately instead of waiting for a crawl. Freshness is cheap to signal here, so signal it.

Then the content work, which is the same passage-level discipline that earns citations everywhere else: sections that stand alone, the answer in the first two sentences, claims and evidence in the same paragraph, real dates and a named author. I have not found a Bing-only content trick, and I’m suspicious of anyone selling one. What differs on Bing is not what earns the citation but how much of the feedback loop you can see.

A workflow that uses the feedback loop

This is the monthly routine I’d run, and it slots into the wider AI visibility check as the Copilot leg:

1. Export the grounding queries for your top ten cited pages.
2. Compare them against each page’s target keyword. Note every recurring query the page answers by accident rather than by design.
3. Pick one page. Restructure it so the accidental answers become deliberate ones - headings phrased as the grounding queries, answers up front.
4. Push the updated URL through IndexNow.
5. Thirty days later, use Compare to see whether citations and Citation Share moved on that page, and only that page.

That last constraint is what makes the loop honest. Change one page at a time and the report becomes a crude experiment. Change ten and it becomes a mood board.

The short version

Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report is currently the most complete citation data any AI platform offers: citations, grounding queries, intent classification and per-query share, against Google’s impressions-only report. Copilot’s audience is small and skews toward exactly the at-work reader B2B marketers want. Verify the site, free the bot, submit the sitemap, then run the grounding-query loop monthly - of everything in my AI SEO routine, it’s the loop I trust most, because it’s the only one with real citation data behind it. The rest of the AI SEO guides cover earning the citations once you can finally see them, and if this is your full-time job, the AI guide for SEO specialists shows where the Bing leg fits in a working week.