Free Check of What Microsoft Copilot Says About You

A hand check answers four questions. Does Copilot name you when a buyer asks about your category? Which competitors does it name instead? Which pages does it cite as sources? Are the facts it states about you right?

It does not tell you why Copilot chose those sources. Nobody outside Microsoft can see that. What you can see is the input side: whether Bing holds your pages and whether its crawler can fetch them.

That input side matters more for Copilot than most people expect. Copilot draws its cited sources from Bing, not Google. In OtterlyAI's 2026 experiment, Google deindexed two test sites while Bing kept them, and Microsoft Copilot supplied 2,718 of the 3,934 AI citations Otterly tracked for one of those sites. Google's own AI surfaces almost never cited them. The lesson for you: an engine cites from the index it holds. If you want the full picture of that pipeline, read how Copilot grounds answers in Bing.

Do these checks before you open Copilot. If one fails, the chat results will only confirm the failure.

1. Check Bing index status. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (bing.com/webmasters) and inspect your homepage, pricing page and main product pages with URL Inspection. A quick rough check is a site:yourdomain.com search on bing.com. Our free index status check for Google and Bing walks through both engines side by side.
2. Read your robots.txt for Bingbot. robots.txt rules are per bot. A blanket block on AI crawlers, or a stray rule for bingbot, can remove you from Bing. A permissive rule looks like this:

User-agent: bingbot
Allow: /

3. Test the firewall, not just the file. A CDN or bot-management rule can return a 403 to Bingbot even when robots.txt allows it. Nothing in robots.txt will show you that. Check your server or CDN logs for Bingbot requests and their status codes. The Bingbot, Copilot and firewall guide covers what to look for.
4. Look for snippet controls. Search your templates for data-nosnippet, nosnippet and max-snippet:0. Bing announced in October 2025 that content marked data-nosnippet is still indexed but is excluded from snippets and AI summaries. These attributes often arrive by accident from a template.

Now run the visible part of the check.

1. Open copilot.microsoft.com in a private browser window. Start a new conversation for each question so earlier turns don't steer the answer.
2. Write three to five questions a real buyer would ask. Mix category questions with direct ones. Say you run a dental clinic in Austin: "best family dentist in Austin for kids", "emergency dentist open Saturday in Austin", and "what does [your clinic] charge for a cleaning".
3. Copy each full answer into a spreadsheet with the date and time.
4. Log every brand Copilot names, in the order it names them.
5. Log every cited URL. Note whether each one is your site, a competitor, or a third party such as a directory, review site or news article.
6. Log every specific fact Copilot states about you: prices, locations, hours, product names, founding year. Mark each one right, wrong, or out of date.
7. Repeat the same questions a week later. Answers change between runs, and one run is a snapshot.

Bing Webmaster Tools includes an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026 and expanded in June 2026. As of October 2026 it covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.

It shows Total Citations, Average Cited Pages, page-level citation activity and, most usefully, grounding queries. Grounding queries are the phrases the AI actually searched when it retrieved your content. That is the real retrieval input, not the prompt a user typed. Microsoft notes the grounding query data is a sample.

Compare the report with your hand log. Did the pages Copilot cited in your test show up in the report? Do the grounding queries match the questions you tested, or reveal topics you never thought to ask? There is no API for this report, so export or screenshot it each month. Our page on free Copilot citation data in Bing Webmaster Tools explains each field.

Treat Citation Share with care. Microsoft describes it as an observational metric, not a ranking or a competitive scoreboard.

Match what you found to the gate it points at, then fix the earliest gate first.

When Copilot cites other sites instead of yours, being named on those sites is associated with getting into the answer. It is not a guaranteed route. For wrong facts, the guide to fixing wrong facts in Copilot answers goes step by step.

A hand check is a small sample. In Otterly's experiment, Microsoft's AI Performance report counted 42,817 citations for one site while Otterly's prompt tracker logged 3,934. The time windows may not have matched, but the gap shows what a prompt sample is.

Copilot also rewrites questions into its own searches. Your prompts are a proxy for queries you can't observe, except through the grounding queries Bing exposes.

No one can give you a Copilot rank or position, and nothing here guarantees a citation. What you control is removing blocks: index eligibility, crawler access, snippet controls and the accuracy of facts on your own pages.

If you want a quick baseline across other AI engines first, the free checker on this site runs up to three buyer questions and scores the answers. It is a snapshot, not continuous tracking, and it does not replace the Bing Webmaster Tools cross-check above. For the firewall gate, the AI Crawler Checker requests a page as each AI crawler and shows which ones your firewall turns away.

Running the same check on other engines is worth it, because results differ by platform. Start with the free Perplexity brand check, and see tracking Copilot grounding queries when you want to monitor Copilot over time.

Does Copilot use Google results? No. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing's index. Otterly's 2026 experiment showed the split clearly: Google removed two test sites, Bing kept them, and Copilot kept citing them while Google's AI surfaces almost never did. A healthy Google index tells you nothing about Bing. Check both engines separately in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Is allowing Bingbot in robots.txt enough? No. robots.txt is necessary but not sufficient. A firewall, CDN or bot-management rule can still return a 403 or a challenge page to Bingbot. The robots.txt file won't show that. Check your server or CDN logs for Bingbot requests and their status codes, or request a page with Bingbot's user-agent and see what comes back.

Will adding schema or an llms.txt file get me cited by Copilot? There's no evidence that it will. Ahrefs' matched-control study found adding schema produced no major uplift in AI citations on any platform it tested. No engine documents reading llms.txt. Existing markup does no harm, but it isn't a lever for AI answers. Your time is better spent on index status, crawler access and correct facts.

How often should I rerun a Copilot brand check? Monthly is a sensible rhythm for most brands, plus after any site migration, CDN change or robots.txt edit. Answers vary between runs, so keep the same question set and compare like with like. Export the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report each month too, since it has no API and you'll want the history.

What if Copilot says something wrong about my company? Log the exact wrong statement and the URLs it cited. If it cites your site, make sure the correct fact appears in plain HTML on a page Bingbot can fetch. If it cites third-party pages, ask those sites to correct the detail. Stating a specific fact clearly gives the engine a sentence it can quote, but no fix guarantees the next answer.