Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth setting up for AI search?

Bing Webmaster Tools is worth an hour for nearly any site that wants to appear in AI answers. The reasons are specific.

First, Bing's index is upstream of Microsoft's AI answers. Microsoft documents Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and Azure's Grounding with Bing Search as Bing-index-backed. If a page isn't in Bing's index, those systems have nothing of yours to retrieve. See how Copilot grounds answers in Bing for the pipeline.

Second, the AI Performance report exposes data nobody else has. It shows grounding queries: the phrases the AI used when retrieving content it then cited. Every other AI visibility method, including prompt trackers, tests prompts someone chose. Engines rewrite those prompts before searching, so the real retrieval input is normally invisible.

Third, it's free first-party data. Microsoft counts the citations itself, rather than estimating them from a sample of prompts.

What it won't do: guarantee inclusion, tell you much about ChatGPT, or report on Google's AI surfaces. Treat it as an index check plus a window into one engine family.

Verification and a sitemap submission are the core of setup. Our Bing Webmaster Tools setup playbook walks through each step. After that, you have three things you didn't have before.

Index status in Bing

You can see which URLs Bing has indexed and which it hasn't. That matters because Bing and Google make separate decisions. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, Google deindexed two AI-generated sites while Bing kept both, and Copilot kept citing them. A healthy Google index tells you nothing about Bing. The Bing vs Google index comparison maps which AI answers draw on which.

The AI Performance report

In public preview since February 2026 and expanded in June 2026, the report covers Copilot, Bing AI summaries and select partner integrations. As of October 2026 it includes:

• Total Citations and Average Cited Pages
• Page-level citation activity
• Grounding queries, with intents and topics
• Citation Share and a Compare view

Real grounding queries

This is the part worth the hour on its own. You'll often find Copilot cited you for searches you never targeted, which is normal, because the AI generates its own queries. Why that happens is worth reading before you react to the list.

"Get into Bing to get into ChatGPT" gets repeated as a strategy. The evidence is weaker than that.

OpenAI's help documentation says ChatGPT search rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries that it sends to search providers, and that it sometimes partners with other search providers. That makes Bing a documented possible upstream. Nobody has measured how much Bing presence changes ChatGPT citations.

The one public test points the other way. In Otterly's experiment, the sites ranked in Bing and ChatGPT's crawlers kept visiting, yet ChatGPT citations were effectively zero. That's one pair of sites on a low-stakes topic, so it doesn't prove Bing is irrelevant to ChatGPT. It does show Bing indexing isn't sufficient.

ChatGPT search has its own gate. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. If ChatGPT is your priority, check that OAI-SearchBot is allowed in robots.txt and that your CDN or firewall doesn't return a 403 to it. The AI Crawler Checker requests a page as each AI crawler and shows which ones get turned away.

The report is valuable, and it still has edges.

• Grounding queries are sampled. Microsoft's own wording says the data shown represents a sample of overall citation activity. That caveat sits inside the grounding query section. Don't assume it applies to every metric, and don't treat the query list as complete. More detail in whether the AI Performance data is sampled.
• No API as of October 2026. The data lives in the interface. You export it by hand, and the API question has its own page.
• Citation Share is not a scoreboard. Microsoft describes it as an observational metric that doesn't expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or score content quality. It can fall while your absolute citations rise.
• Citations aren't clicks. The report counts citations and impressions, not visits.
• It covers Microsoft surfaces only. Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are outside it.

One useful contrast: in Otterly's test, Microsoft's report credited one site with 42,817 citations while Otterly's prompt-based tracker logged 3,934. The time windows may not match, so it's not an exact ratio. It does show that a first-party count sees more than any prompt sample.

1. Verify your site and submit your sitemap.
2. Check index coverage for the pages that carry your key facts: pricing, product pages, the about page.
3. Look for accidental suppression. Bing supports data-nosnippet as of October 2025: marked content stays indexed but is excluded from snippets and AI summaries. A template-wide tag can hide more than intended.
4. Open the AI Performance report and note which pages are cited, if any.
5. Export the grounding queries and compare them with the questions you assumed buyers ask. The export and analysis playbook covers the method.
6. Optionally set up IndexNow. Bing consumes it, but the IndexNow specification never mentions AI, and a successful ping only confirms receipt. Treat it as Bing housekeeping.

Then revisit monthly. What's in your control is index eligibility, crawler access and fetchable facts. What Copilot chooses to cite isn't.

Does being in Bing's index guarantee Copilot will cite me? No. Indexing makes a page eligible for retrieval, not selected. Copilot generates its own queries, retrieves candidates, and chooses which to cite, and none of that is under your control. What you control is whether your pages are indexed, reachable by crawlers, and state your key facts in plain HTML that can be fetched without running JavaScript.

Is there anything comparable for Google's AI Overviews? Partly. As of October 2026, Google Search Console has a generative AI report, but it shows impressions only, with no clicks, CTR, position or query-level grounding data. It also has an opt-out control for AI features that is on by default. Nothing on Google's side exposes the queries its AI surfaces actually ran.

Should I block Bing to keep content out of Copilot? If you want to stay out of AI summaries but keep normal search traffic, use snippet controls instead of a full block. Bing documents that content marked with data-nosnippet is still indexed and available for ranking but excluded from snippets and AI summaries. Blocking bingbot removes you from Bing search entirely, which is a much bigger cost.

How long until grounding query data appears? Microsoft doesn't publish a timeline. Data only appears once Copilot or Bing AI summaries cite your pages, and many sites see little or nothing at first. An empty report isn't an error. Check index coverage first, since unindexed pages can't be cited by Bing-backed answers at all.