Free Copilot Citation Data in Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing's AI Performance report is free first-party data from the operator of the index that Copilot grounds on. Microsoft launched it in public preview on 10 February 2026 and expanded it on 16 June 2026.

As of October 2026, it shows:

• Total citations: how often your site was cited in AI answers.
• Average cited pages: how many of your pages were cited.
• Page-level citation activity: which URLs earned the citations.
• Grounding queries: the key phrases the AI used when it retrieved content that was then cited.
• Intents and topics: how those queries group.
• Citation share and compare: your share of citations over time.

Grounding queries matter most. Copilot rewrites a user's prompt into its own searches. Every prompt tracker tests prompts it chose. This report shows the queries the system actually ran. Coverage spans Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Do not assume ChatGPT is included; see whether the report counts ChatGPT citations.

You need a site you control and about ten minutes. For a fuller walkthrough, see setting up Bing Webmaster Tools for AI reporting.

1. Sign in at https://www.bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
2. Add your site. The quickest route is importing it from Google Search Console if you already use it.
3. If you do not import, verify ownership with one method: upload the BingSiteAuth.xml file to your root, add a DNS CNAME record, or add the meta tag below to your homepage head.
4. Submit your XML sitemap under Sitemaps so Bing can find your pages.
5. Confirm Bing can reach you. Your robots.txt must not block bingbot, and your CDN or firewall must not return 403 to it.
6. Open the AI Performance report from the left navigation. Data appears once Bing has citation activity for the site.

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR_VERIFICATION_CODE" />

Step 5 is the one people skip. An engine cannot cite what its index does not hold. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, Google removed two AI-generated sites from its index and its AI surfaces stopped citing them, while Bing kept them indexed and Copilot kept citing them.

Start with pages, then queries, then share.

Cited pages

Check which URLs carry the citations. If your pricing or product pages are missing, check whether their key facts appear in the raw HTML. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, and content that loads only after hydration may never be read.

Grounding queries

Read these as the real input to retrieval. Compare them with the prompts you assumed buyers type. Gaps tell you which topics Copilot associates with your pages and which it does not. Our guide to exporting and analyzing grounding queries covers how to sort them.

Citation share

Microsoft describes citation share as an observational metric, not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share or score content quality. Its denominator is dominated by whoever already wins the query, so it can fall while your absolute citations rise. Read it next to total citations, never alone.

A suppression check

If a page is indexed but a section never shows up, look for data-nosnippet, nosnippet or max-snippet:0. Bing documents that content marked data-nosnippet is still indexed but excluded from snippets and AI summaries. Templates often apply it by accident. More detail in Bing's data-nosnippet support, digested.

The report is the best Copilot data available, and it still has hard edges.

• Grounding queries are sampled. Microsoft scopes its sampling note to the grounding queries metric. Total citations and page activity carry different caveats. Do not tell your team the whole report is sampled, or that grounding queries are complete. See whether the AI Performance data is sampled.
• There is no API. The Bing Webmaster API documentation has no citation or grounding endpoints as of October 2026. Microsoft has signalled API access may arrive, but plan for manual exports until it does. More on the API question.
• Citations are not traffic. The report counts citations, not clicks or revenue.
• Citation is not influence. Research on how models cite shows citation output can be changed without changing the sources, so a count is a proxy.
• It covers Microsoft surfaces. It says nothing reliable about Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude.

The report also sees more than a prompt sample does. In Otterly's experiment, Microsoft's report credited one site with 42,817 citations while Otterly's prompt tracker logged 3,934. The time windows may differ, so that is not an exact ratio.

Because there is no API, set a routine.

1. Export or screenshot the report on the same day each month.
2. Save cited pages and grounding queries in a shared sheet with the export date.
3. Tag each grounding query to a product, page or topic you care about.
4. After a site change (a rendering fix, a new pricing page), note the date so you can compare before and after.

Nothing here guarantees more citations. What you control is access, rendering and stating your facts plainly on fetchable pages. What Copilot chooses to cite is Microsoft's call.

Bing's report needs a verified site and citation history before it shows anything. If you want a quick read on what AI engines say about your brand today, 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 Bing's first-party data.

For Copilot specifically, our free check of what Copilot says about you pairs well with the AI Performance report: one shows the answer, the other shows the queries and pages behind it.