Copilot and Bing AI Search in 2026: How to Get Your Website Cited

Copilot and Bing AI search are Microsoft's answer engines, and Microsoft describes its Copilot experiences as powered by Bing, so a page gets cited there by first being crawled and indexed by Bing. Let Bingbot in, verify the website in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap, and open each page with a direct, sourced answer.

This article is part of our complete guide: AI Search Optimization.

• Since 10 February 2026, the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools has shown citations in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partner integrations (Bing Webmaster Blog on AI Performance).
• On 13 October 2026 Bing added Topics Portfolio, a beta tab that groups your grounding queries into topics and lists queries where other websites are cited instead (Bing Webmaster Blog on Topics Portfolio).
• Since October 2025, the data-nosnippet attribute has kept a marked section out of Bing Search and Copilot answers while the page stays indexed (Bing Webmaster Blog on data-nosnippet).
• Bing's 2023 rules say a NOARCHIVE meta tag keeps a page out of its chat answers, while NOCACHE limits them to the URL, title and snippet (Bing Webmaster Blog on NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE).
• Bing processes sitemaps at least once every 24 hours, and it offers 5 ways to verify a website, one of them an import from Google Search Console (Bing Webmaster Blog on getting started).

How does Microsoft Copilot find the pages it cites?

Microsoft Copilot finds the pages it cites through Bing, which Microsoft says powers its Copilot experiences. A page that Bing has not crawled and indexed gives Copilot nothing to retrieve.

When Copilot needs the web to answer a question, it retrieves content using short search phrases that Bing calls grounding queries. Bing's AI Performance report defines them as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in answers. That detail matters for planning: retrieval runs on phrases, so a page is matched to a question through the words a searcher would use, not through the page as a whole.

Bing has said the same thing from another angle. In a December 2025 post on duplicate content, its product managers wrote that many large language models rely on data grounded in the Bing index or other search indexes, and that AI search builds on the same signals that support traditional SEO. In plain terms, the work that gets a page into Bing's results is also the entry ticket to Copilot's answers.

Many businesses have tuned their website for Google for years and never looked at Bing. Their pages may be crawled less often, their sitemap may never have been submitted, and a firewall rule may have refused Bingbot without anyone noticing. Microsoft publishes no formula for which retrieved pages Copilot names as sources, so everything below sticks to what Bing documents and labels the rest as what owners observe.

Is Bingbot allowed to reach your website?

Bingbot is allowed when neither robots.txt nor a firewall turns it away. Check both, because either one on its own can keep a website out of Copilot.

Bing states that it respects content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported control mechanisms, so a refusal in robots.txt is final. Open yourdomain/robots.txt and look for a group that names bingbot with Disallow: / beneath it, or a User-agent: * group with Disallow: / left over from a staging copy that went live. Either line asks Bing to stay out of every page, and Copilot then has nothing from you to cite.

The second place a block hides is in front of the website. Content delivery networks, host-level bot protection and security plugins can answer Bingbot with a challenge page or an error even when robots.txt welcomes it. Bing Webmaster Tools includes Site Explorer, which Bing describes as your site's structure as seen by Bing, with crawl blocks and error responses marked, so it shows these refusals from Bing's side.

Where a block hides	What it looks like	Where to fix it
robots.txt	A bingbot group, or a group for every bot, with Disallow: /	The robots.txt file or the setting that writes it
CDN or firewall	Bingbot receives a challenge page or a 403 error	The bot or firewall rules in the CDN dashboard
Security plugin	Unknown visitors are rate limited or refused	The plugin's bot or firewall settings
Robots meta tag	A noindex tag removes the page from Bing's index	The page's SEO settings or theme

One difference from other engines is worth knowing. OpenAI and Anthropic name separate bots for search and for model training, but the Bing pages we read describe no separate crawler to allow for Copilot and another to block for training. The controls Bing documents for its answers are page-level tags, covered further down, so blocking Bingbot to keep content away from AI would also remove the website from Bing's own results.

How do you set up Bing Webmaster Tools so Copilot can use your pages?

Set up Bing Webmaster Tools in four moves: add and verify the website, submit the sitemap, turn on IndexNow, then check Site Explorer for pages Bing cannot crawl. The first two steps decide whether Bing can read the website at all.

Bing offers five ways to verify ownership. Domain Connect is recommended if your DNS provider supports it, because it verifies the domain after you sign in to the provider; the alternatives are an XML file placed in the website's root folder, a meta tag in the homepage's head section, a DNS TXT record, or an import from Google Search Console if the website is already verified there. Once a green checkmark appears, the dashboard starts collecting data.

Sitemaps come next. Reference the sitemap in robots.txt or submit it in the Sitemaps section, where Bing reports its status, last read date and any errors. Bing's July 2025 post on sitemaps in AI powered search adds two useful rules: set lastmod to the time a page's content actually changed, not the time the sitemap was generated, and do not rely on changefreq or priority, which Bing ignores.

Bing describes IndexNow as optional but highly recommended, and lists three ways to switch it on: a content management system with built-in support such as Shopify, Wix or Duda, an IndexNow plugin, or a direct implementation in the website's code. If your platform offers it, switch it on once and every later change is reported without anyone remembering to do it. Then open Site Explorer and confirm that your most important pages show no crawl blocks or error responses.

What does the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools show?

The AI Performance report shows how often your pages are cited as sources in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partner integrations, and which grounding queries retrieved them. It is Microsoft's own record of Copilot citations.

Bing defines each figure carefully, and the definitions say as much about what the report does not show as what it does. Read the table before reading the numbers, because a high citation count does not mean a page sits at the top of an answer. The same caution applies to falls, which may reflect fewer questions on your subject rather than a weaker page.

Metric	Bing's definition	What it does not tell you
Total Citations	Citations shown as sources in AI answers in the selected time frame	Where in the answer the citation appeared
Average Cited Pages	Unique pages from your site cited per day, averaged over the range	Ranking, authority or each page's role
Grounding queries	Key phrases the AI used when retrieving content it referenced	Every query: Bing says this is a sample
Page-level citation activity	Citation counts for each URL	A page's importance or placement
Visibility trends	A timeline of citation activity across supported AI experiences	Why a line moved

Topics Portfolio, added in beta on 13 October 2026, sits as a tab next to Citations and Pages. It groups your grounding queries into topics and shows, for each one, an approximate Topic Size (citations across all websites), the approximate number of Sites Cited and the approximate number of distinct queries, over windows of one, two or three months. Inside a topic, Bing pairs your queries with opportunity queries where other websites are cited and yours is not, which is the most direct to-do list Microsoft has published for Copilot.

Bing asks owners to treat these numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger, and it hides topics with too little data, so a quiet website may see a short list or none at all. The report is in public preview, so expect its views to change. Note the date range on every screenshot you keep, so later comparisons use the same window.

Which tags stop Copilot from quoting a page?

Five page-level controls limit what Copilot may quote: noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet, and Bing's NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE tags. Any of them can be left behind by an old theme or plugin.

Control	Effect in Bing and Copilot, as Bing describes it	Bing source
noindex	The page is not indexed, so it cannot be retrieved	data-nosnippet post, October 2025
nosnippet	Blocks all text and preview thumbnails from snippets	data-nosnippet post, October 2025
max-snippet	Limits how much text a preview may show	data-nosnippet post, October 2025
data-nosnippet	A marked section stays out of Bing Search and Copilot answers; the page is still indexed and ranks	data-nosnippet post, October 2025
NOARCHIVE	The page is left out of chat answers and not linked, and is not used to train foundation models	Chat controls post, September 2023
NOCACHE	Chat answers may show only the URL, title and snippet	Chat controls post, September 2023

NOARCHIVE deserves the closest look, because owners set it for reasons that have nothing to do with AI. Under Bing's 2023 rules, a page carrying it is excluded from the chat answers and not linked to in them, though it still appears in ordinary results, and a page carrying both tags is treated as NOCACHE. That post is the latest Bing statement on these two tags we found, and it was written when Copilot was still called Bing Chat, so read it as Bing's last published rule rather than a promise about every Copilot surface today.

The data-nosnippet attribute is the precise tool. Bing suggests it for paywalled text, comments, legal boilerplate, outdated notices and promotional content, so the rest of the page can still be quoted. A hypothetical clinic in Leeds could mark an expired winter offer this way and leave its treatment descriptions open to Copilot, rather than hiding the whole page.

What kind of page does Copilot cite?

Bing advises pages with depth on their subject, clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, evidence such as data and cited sources, and facts kept current. Those are the qualities it names alongside the AI Performance report.

Bing's advice reads like an editor's checklist. It says deepening coverage in related areas can reinforce authority, that clear headings, tables and FAQ sections help surface key information, and that examples, data and cited sources help build trust when content is reused in AI answers. It adds two points owners often skip: update pages regularly so AI systems reference the current version, and align text, images and video so they describe the same products and services in the same way.

Duplicate pages are a quieter problem. Bing's December 2025 post warns that AI systems may cluster near-duplicate pages and pick one to represent the group, possibly an outdated version, so consolidate overlapping pages, use 301 redirects for redundant ones and make localised pages genuinely different. A hypothetical plumber in Nairobi with five near-identical suburb pages would do better with one strong service page, or with suburb pages that each carry real local detail such as response times and the estates covered.

Owners also observe that pages opening with a direct answer are the ones engines quote, which fits how retrieval works. Because Copilot retrieves content through short grounding queries, a passage that answers one phrase completely is easier to match than a paragraph that circles the topic. Treat this as a reasonable reading of Bing's definitions rather than a rule Bing publishes: put the question in a heading, answer it in the first two sentences, then give the evidence.

How does a local business show up in Copilot answers?

A local business shows up through Bing Places for Business, which Bing recommends so that address, hours and contact details stay current and eligible for AI answers. The website then has to agree with that listing.

Claim or create the listing, choose the most specific category, and keep holiday hours up to date, because an answer built from an old listing repeats the old hours. Match the business name, address and phone number on the website exactly, with each service on its own page that names the service and the area in plain text. If Copilot gives a wrong detail, check whether a directory, an old listing or a forgotten page on your own website still states it, and correct the source rather than the answer.

How quickly do website changes reach Copilot?

Changes reach Copilot after Bing recrawls the changed page, and Bing publishes no fixed delay. Sitemaps are read at least once a day, and IndexNow notifies Bing the moment a URL changes.

The delay matters most for facts that change: prices on your own price list, opening hours, stock, staff and service areas. A sitemap with honest lastmod dates tells Bing which pages changed since its last visit, and IndexNow removes the wait for that visit. Neither one forces Bing to recrawl, and neither one makes a page more likely to be cited, but both shorten the time an outdated fact can sit in an answer.

That leads to a narrower question with its own guide: IndexNow for AI search, which explains what the protocol does, which engines share the URLs you send, how to set it up with a key file, and why a successful ping is a notice rather than a promise of citation. Read it when you are ready to switch IndexNow on. The rest of this guide holds whether or not you use it.

Where does the AI Search Visibility Checker fit alongside Bing's reports?

The AI Search Visibility Checker predicts how quotable each page is before Copilot cites it, while Bing's AI Performance report counts citations that have already happened. Use them together.

You can scan your website with the AI Search Visibility Checker to see whether the bots behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI and Copilot are allowed in robots.txt, and whether your homepage actually loads when requested as each bot, which catches firewall blocks that robots.txt hides. Each page gets an AI Citation Score out of 100 across five areas, along with the question the page can win and the passage an AI engine would quote. A page engines cannot reach scores at most 10, a noindex page at most 15 and a page under 80 words at most 30, so the worst problems rise to the top.

Five pages are read with no account, and up to 50 with an account for 1 credit, about $0.65. The checker changes nothing on your website, and it does not measure whether Copilot quotes you today, which is exactly what the AI Performance report adds. The scoring is explained on the method page, so you can see why each page lost points before you rewrite it.

Questions business owners ask about Copilot

Does Copilot use Google's index?

Microsoft describes its Copilot experiences as powered by Bing, not Google. A page indexed by Google may still be missing from Bing, so check Site Explorer in Bing Webmaster Tools rather than assuming. Importing the website from Google Search Console is a faster way to verify it.

Can I keep my content out of AI training but still appear in Copilot?

Not through a bot name, because the Bing pages we read name no separate training crawler to block. Bing's 2023 NOARCHIVE tag kept content out of foundation model training but also out of chat answers, so it is not a training-only switch. If being cited matters to you, leave Bingbot allowed and avoid NOARCHIVE on pages you want quoted.

Do I need schema markup to be cited by Copilot?

Bing's AI Performance announcement does not mention schema markup among its advice. It names depth, headings, tables, FAQ sections, evidence, freshness and consistency across text, images and video. Structured data still helps state your business facts plainly, but no Bing page we read says it is required for Copilot.

Why is my AI Performance report empty?

An empty report usually means Bing has recorded few or no citations yet, or the website was verified recently. Bing hides Topics Portfolio topics with too little data, so quiet websites see less. Check that the sitemap is processed and that Site Explorer shows your key pages indexed before drawing conclusions.

Can I see which questions Copilot cited me for?

Partly. The grounding queries view lists the phrases Copilot used when it retrieved your content, but Bing says this is a sample of citation activity rather than every query. Topics Portfolio then groups those phrases and shows where other websites are cited instead.

Your Copilot plan for the next 30 days

Spend the first week on access and setup, the next two on your most important pages, and the last on reading Bing's reports. An hour or two a week keeps it moving.

Week	Task	Done when
1	Check robots.txt, firewall rules and robots meta tags for Bingbot; verify in Bing Webmaster Tools	Bingbot gets a normal page and the website shows a green checkmark
2	Submit the sitemap with honest lastmod dates and turn on IndexNow	The sitemap shows as processed
3	Rewrite your five most important pages answer-first, with evidence and dates	Each opens with a question heading and a direct answer
4	Read AI Performance and Topics Portfolio, then update Bing Places for Business	You have a list of opportunity queries to write for

Start with week one even if you are short of time, because a website Bing cannot read cannot be cited however good its pages are. After the first month, revisit the opportunity queries each month and write or improve one page for each phrase where a competitor is cited and you are not. Run the checker again after each round of changes, and compare its scores with the citation counts Bing reports, so you learn which fixes made the difference on your own website.