VerseOdin published this article on July 9, 2026. It explains Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools’ new AI Performance report and what it means for medium-sized teams.
Bing Webmaster Tools now shows publisher data for Microsoft Copilot citations. The report reveals which grounding queries and cited pages pull content into AI-generated answers, how often they appear, and how that changes over time.
The article says search visibility is no longer only about blue links and rankings. Copilot answers questions directly in Bing, Windows, and Microsoft 365. That creates a new need to measure citations, not just clicks.
Microsoft launched AI Performance in public preview on February 10, 2026 and expanded it in June 2026 with four additional reporting layers. Google launched a more limited comparable report on June 3, 2026.
The article says the most useful feature is the mapping between grounding queries and cited pages. A team can click a query to see every cited page, or click a page to see every query that triggered it.
This helps teams see not only whether Copilot cites them, but why and for what kind of intent.
The article argues that Bing’s report is useful but incomplete. For teams that care about AI visibility across multiple surfaces, it is only one part of the picture. The article recommends using Bing’s report as a baseline, then widening monitoring beyond Microsoft’s ecosystem.
It is a dashboard inside Bing Webmaster Tools that shows how often a website is cited in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI summaries, and select partner surfaces.
They are the retrieval phrases the AI system generates internally while building an answer. They often differ from the user’s original wording.
No. It only covers Microsoft’s ecosystem.
The article suggests a weekly glance and a monthly review for decisions.