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Engine guide: Copilot

How to get cited by Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is the only major assistant whose owner gives publishers citation data. That report turns this from guesswork into ordinary search work on an index many teams have neglected.

The short answer

Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in the Bing index, crawled by Bingbot. Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools includes an AI Performance report showing which of your pages Copilot cited and the grounding queries that retrieved them. To be cited, get fully indexed in Bing, use IndexNow for fresh pages, and write sections that answer the grounding queries the report shows.

What ranked on 26 September 2026: Microsoft's announcement of the AI Performance report and coverage in the search trade press rank for this query. Most generic AEO guides predate the report and still describe Copilot visibility as unmeasurable.

What is specific to Copilot

Copilot sits on Microsoft's own search stack, so everything that applies to Bing applies here, and Microsoft publishes more of it than other vendors do.

  • Bingbot is the crawler. There is no separate Copilot agent to allow, so a Bingbot block removes you entirely
  • The AI Performance report lists cited URLs, citation counts over time, and grounding queries, which are the searches Copilot generated rather than the user's words
  • IndexNow lets you notify Bing of new or changed URLs immediately, instead of waiting for a recrawl
  • Copilot appears inside Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365 and Bing itself, so the same citation can reach very different audiences
  • Bing's index also feeds other products, so work here can carry beyond Copilot

Things that sound right and are not

  • ClaimOur Google indexing is fine, so Bing must be too.

    The indexes differ, often a lot. Sites commonly find large sections unindexed in Bing once they check. Look at the coverage report before anything else.

  • ClaimGrounding queries are the same as user prompts.

    They are Copilot's reformulations. They are often shorter and more literal than the prompt. Write headings that match those phrasings, not the chatty version.

  • ClaimEnterprise Copilot answers from the web the same way.

    Microsoft 365 Copilot can answer from internal documents first, and admins can restrict web grounding. Public-web work matters most for consumer Copilot and Bing.

Where to start

  1. 01Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, and review which important pages are missing from the index.
  2. 02Set up IndexNow through your CMS or CDN so updates reach Bing the day they ship.
  3. 03Open the AI Performance report and list the grounding queries that already cite you, and the pages they land on.
  4. 04For queries where you are cited weakly, tighten the matching section so it answers in the first lines.
  5. 05Compare citation trends monthly against the pages you changed, which gives you a real before and after.

Questions

Does the AI Performance report show clicks?
It focuses on citations and grounding queries rather than click-through from Copilot answers. Use referral data in analytics for traffic.
Is Copilot worth the effort given its market share?
The effort overlaps with Bing indexing, which may also support other assistants that use Bing results. The report alone justifies an hour of setup.
Does Copilot respect robots.txt?
Bingbot honours robots.txt, and Bing supports noarchive and nocache directives to limit how content is used in answers.

Related

Doing this yourself and want a second opinion on what the assistants say about you? Tell me what you are seeing, or read the AEO Playbook for the whole framework.