Is Copilot Quoting Your Website?

Most advice about Bing Webmaster Tools boils down to "submit your site to Bing too." That's fine. It's also not why I spent an evening in August setting it up across the sites I manage.

I wanted to know one thing. When somebody asks Microsoft Copilot a question, does it quote my clients' websites as a source? And if it does, for what?

Bing Webmaster Tools is the only place I've found that answers that with a count and the actual search phrases behind it.

What Microsoft Says the AI Performance Report Does

The feature is called AI Performance. According to the Bing Webmaster blog, it went into public preview in February 2026 and shows how your content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and "select partner integrations."

Here's what the dashboard gives you:

• Total citations. How many times your pages were shown as a source in an AI answer.
• Average cited pages. How many different pages on your site got cited per day.
• Grounding queries. The phrases the AI searched for when it went looking for sources and landed on you.
• Page-level citations and a trend line over time.

Two caveats are right there in Microsoft's own post. The grounding query data is "a sample of overall citation activity," not a complete log. And a citation says nothing about ranking or placement inside the answer. It's free, and all you need is a verified site.

How I Set It Up Across a Couple Dozen Sites

Adding sites one at a time means a meta tag or a DNS record for each one. Bing has a shortcut. Its Import button pulls your verified sites straight out of Google Search Console, up to 100 at a time, and verifies them for you.

Once the sites were in, I opened the AI Performance report for each one on the default three-month window, for client sites and my own.

Where the AI Performance Report Delivered

It fills in the past

This was the surprise. Bing's own import page warns it can take up to 48 hours to get traffic data for a newly verified site. So I expected to come back in a couple of days and find nothing.

Instead, one property showed thousands of citations a few minutes after the import, with history running back to late May. The report is backfilled, not forward-only. You get a baseline the same day you connect.

The grounding queries are the real prize

A citation count tells you something is happening. The grounding queries tell you what. On sitezinc.com, the one named query was "divi 5 release date," which lines up with the Divi 5 release history post I wrote earlier this year. That's a useful signal about which kind of content Copilot trusts.

Across the client sites, the queries ran from brand names to plain how-to questions the business answers well. One client picked up a big share of the citations on two questions from people looking for exactly the service that business sells. That's the kind of thing a business owner actually cares about.

Google still doesn't show you the question

Google added its own AI report in June. According to Google, it shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it rolled out to every site on August 31, 2026. You can slice it by page, country, device and date. There's no query dimension and no clicks. So Google tells you that you showed up. Bing tells you what the person was asking.

How to Get Bing Webmaster Tools Set Up the First Time

Here's what I'd do if I were starting over.

1. Find the verified owner first. In Search Console, open Settings, then Users and permissions, for each property. Note which Google account is the verified owner and run the Bing import signed in as that one. If you were only added as an owner by someone else, those sites won't come across.
2. Check My Sites, not the result screen. My import showed an error message and still brought every site in. The site list is what counts.
3. Verify the leftovers directly. A site that isn't verified in Search Console won't import. Add it in Bing with a meta tag or a DNS record. If you run Rank Math, it has a field for the Bing tag. (I compared it with Yoast in my Rank Math vs Yoast post.)
4. Pull a baseline the same day. The history is already there. Write it down, then use the report's Compare mode a month later to see what moved.

One thing to watch when you read the numbers. A big total can lean on one or two pages. On the day I pulled mine, two sites held roughly 70 percent of all the citations across the client sites I manage. If one of those pages goes stale, the number goes with it.

Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools for the AI Data, Not the Traffic

Bing Webmaster Tools is worth setting up today for the AI Performance report alone. It's free. It fills in months of history the moment you connect. And it shows you the actual questions that led Copilot to your pages, which nothing from Google does right now.

Just read it for what it is. It covers Microsoft's AI answers, not AI in general. And a citation is not a visit, so don't read it as traffic or sales.

If you'd like to know whether Copilot is quoting your site, and for what, that's the kind of thing I help with.

Questions I Get About Bing's AI Report

Does a Copilot citation mean someone visited my site?

No. It means Copilot showed your page as a source in an answer. The report doesn't show clicks, so treat citations as visibility, not traffic.

Does the Bing report include ChatGPT?

Microsoft says it covers Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. It doesn't name the partners, so I report it as Microsoft Copilot citations rather than AI citations in general.

Do I need to add code to my site?

Not if the site is already verified in Google Search Console. The import handles verification for you. Otherwise Bing accepts a meta tag or a DNS record.

Sources

• Bing Webmaster Blog: Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview
• Bing Webmaster Blog: Easily Verify Your Site in Bing Webmaster Tools by Importing from Google Search Console
• Google Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report (Search)
• Search Engine Land: Google Search Console AI performance reports rolling out globally