The Short Answer
To get cited by Microsoft Copilot, get your pages into Bing, keep Bing informed whenever they change, and write pages that answer a specific question in their opening lines. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing search, so Bing indexation is the entry ticket, IndexNow is how you stay current, and the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools is where you check whether any of it is working.
Why this engine is worth doing first
Most AI visibility advice is written for ChatGPT and Google. Copilot sits on a different index and reports its citations openly, and in our experience the effort shows up in its numbers quickly, which makes it the easiest engine to learn on.
Copilot Runs on Bing
Copilot grounds its answers with Bing. When it needs current information it generates search phrases, which Microsoft calls grounding queries, retrieves results from Bing and cites the pages it uses. If Bing has not indexed a page, Copilot's grounding simply cannot reach it, no matter how well that page performs on Google.
That makes Bing Webmaster Tools the most important console most sites never open. Verification, a submitted sitemap and a clean index coverage report there matter more for Copilot than anything you can do inside Google Search Console.
| Surface | What it runs on | Where you check it |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing search grounding | Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance |
| AI summaries in Bing | The Bing index | Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance |
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Google Search | Google Search Console, with no separate citation report |
The Report That Shows Your Copilot Citations
In February 2026 Microsoft released the AI Performance report inside Bing Webmaster Tools. It covers Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations, and it answers a question most AI engines do not answer for publishers at all: how often your pages are cited.
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Total citations | How many times your content appeared as a source in AI answers during the date range |
| Average cited pages | The daily average of unique URLs from your site referenced across AI answers |
| Page level activity | Which URLs are cited most, and how that changes over time |
| Grounding queries | A sample of the phrases the AI used when retrieving content, not a complete list |
The grounding queries are the part worth studying closely. They are not what a user typed. They are what Copilot searched for on the user's behalf, which makes them the most direct view any engine offers of the questions your pages are being retrieved to answer.
It surprises almost everyone the first time
When we first opened the report for one of the sites we run, it showed around 1,500 Copilot citations a month that nobody had noticed, most of them landing on just three articles. Citations can be real and substantial while every analytics tool you own reports nothing at all.
From 2 Citations a Day to 30
A small information site we run gives the clearest before and after we have. Through the start of August its Copilot citations sat at around 2 a day. After the 6th of August they climbed to an average of 30.2 a day, and the report showed 622 citations in total over the period we were measuring.
Three things changed in the weeks around that jump, and we want to be precise about what we can claim. They coincided with the rise. We did not run a controlled test, so this is correlation observed on a real site rather than proof, and it should be read that way.
Question shaped articles
New pages each answered one specific, practical question in the title and the opening lines, the kind of question a person types into an assistant word for word.
A dated data page, updated monthly
A table of real figures with the edition date at the top, refreshed every month so it always said something that was not true the month before.
IndexNow on every publish
Each new or changed page was announced to Bing the moment it went live, instead of waiting for a recrawl.
The same site also showed how differently the two search engines treated it. Over 90 days Bing sent 51 clicks from 544 impressions, a click rate of 9.38%, while Google sent 8 clicks from 449 impressions at 1.78%. For that small site the Microsoft side of search was worth six times the clicks, with the Copilot citations on top.
When Copilot Citations Drop to Zero
The reverse can happen overnight. Another site we run dropped to zero Bing impressions on the 15th of May 2026, and its Copilot citations stopped the same day, while Bing Webmaster Tools reported no errors, no penalties and normal indexing. The pages were indexed but no longer served.
Two months of resubmitted sitemaps, IndexNow pings and URL submissions changed nothing. What worked was a short message to Bing support in mid July asking for a human review of the domain. Two days later the site was serving again, with impressions back to about 1,200 a day and Copilot citations reaching 344 a day, around 2.4 times its previous peak.
If your citations vanish and the dashboard looks clean
Check whether impressions dropped to zero on the same day. If they did and Webmaster Tools shows no problem, contact Bing support, give the exact date, say the site appears indexed but not served, and ask for a human review. The form has a 500 character limit, so keep it factual and specific.
The full story of that recovery, including the exact wording that worked, is the kind of thing worth keeping in a runbook, because the symptoms look like a technical fault and send most teams searching the codebase for a bug that is not there. The IndexNow setup was already correct the whole time.
One Page Can Carry Most of It
Copilot citations concentrate hard. On one of our products, a single best of article accounts for 34,400 of 55,300Copilot citations, about 62% of the site's total. On another site, roughly 1,712 citations clustered on a handful of utility questions the product was never built around, against 111 clicks.
Two lessons follow. Protect the pages that carry your citations, because merging, redirecting or heavily rewriting one of them can remove most of your visibility in a single change. And look at what you are actually being cited for before deciding what to write next, since citation tracking regularly shows demand in places a content plan never looked.
New Pages Wait Longest for Bing
Bing treats sites it already knows very differently from sites it has just met. Across the established sites we run, requests identifying as bingbot came to 31,829 in fifteen days of September, more than any other crawler in our logs. A brand new blog section we launched in the summer, by contrast, had been visited by bingbot 4 times in total when we audited it after twelve days live.
That gap is the reason IndexNow matters so much for Copilot in particular. A new page on an established site gets crawled soon anyway. A new page on a new site, or in a new section, can sit unseen by Bing for weeks, and a page Bing has not crawled is a page Copilot cannot ground on. Announcing each page the moment it goes live closes most of that gap without waiting for Bing to come looking.
What IndexNow does and does not do
It tells Bing that a page exists or has changed, which speeds discovery and recrawling. It does not raise a page in the rankings or guarantee that Copilot will cite it. On one site we audited it got all 135 pages accepted for submission and moved no rankings at all, which is exactly the job it is meant to do.
Write Pages Copilot Can Ground On
A grounding query is a search phrase, so the page that wins it is usually the one whose title and opening lines match the shape of that phrase and answer it immediately. Research on AI citations more broadly puts about 44% of citations in the first 30% of a page, which is a strong argument for putting the answer at the top rather than after an introduction.
| Grounding query shape | The page that tends to answer it |
|---|---|
| How to do a specific task | A page titled as that task, with the steps starting in the first screen |
| Cost or price of something in a given year | A dated table with the current figure in the first row |
| Is one option better than another | A comparison that states its verdict in the first two sentences |
| What a term means | A definition in one plain sentence, then the detail |
The grounding queries in your own report are the better guide than any generic list, because they show the exact phrasing Copilot uses for your topic. Where a phrase appears repeatedly and no page of yours answers it directly, that is the next page to write.
Copilot and ChatGPT Share More Than You Think
Bing is also the primary documented third party index behind ChatGPT search, so almost everything in this guide helps there too. Pages that Bing indexes quickly and serves well are the same pages ChatGPT search can find, which is why checking Bing indexation is one of the first steps when a site is missing from ChatGPT.
The two behave very differently once they have found you, though. On our sites over the same fortnight ChatGPT sent nearly forty times as many visits as Copilot, while Copilot is the one that tells you how often it cites you. Doing the Bing work once pays off in both, and the AI Performance report is the only place you can watch part of that return arrive.
The Playbook
Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap
Import from Google Search Console if you use it. It takes minutes and everything else depends on it.
Automate IndexNow
Notify Bing whenever a page is published or changed, as part of the deploy, not as a task somebody has to remember.
Export grounding queries from the AI Performance report
These are the searches Copilot runs to find your pages. Group them by intent.
Write the missing answers
For each group of grounding queries without a strong page, publish one page that answers the question in its title and first two sentences.
Add dated, specific data where you honestly can
Tables of real figures with an edition date give Copilot something current and quotable.
Guard the most cited pages
Before changing any URL in the report top ten, check its share of your citations first.
The mechanics of step two are covered in our IndexNow guide. It is worth doing properly, because a manual ping quietly stops happening after a few weeks while an automated one runs on every publish without anybody thinking about it.
Does Copilot Send Traffic?
Some, though far less than ChatGPT. Across the sites we run, over fifteen days in September, Copilot sent 111 visits against about 4,100 from ChatGPT. For most sites the value of Copilot is the citation itself, your name inside an answer, with visits as a smaller bonus on top. That is why the AI Performance report, not analytics, is the right place to judge it.
It is also why Copilot rewards a different habit from the one analytics trains. A page that earns hundreds of citations and a handful of clicks can look like a failure in a traffic report and be one of the most valuable pages you own in the report that counts.
The Bottom Line
Copilot is the rare AI engine that runs on an index you can see into and reports its citations openly. Get indexed in Bing, keep Bing informed, answer specific questions early on the page, and read the grounding queries it hands you. On one small site that was enough to move from 2 citations a day to 30. The engine nobody optimises for is the one with room left in it, and for the wider picture across engines, start with how citation works on ChatGPT.