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Microsoft Copilot and Bing: where the sources come from

Microsoft Copilot gets its web sources from Bing. Microsoft says Copilot turns a prompt into a short search query, sends it to the Bing search service, and writes its answer from what comes back. So for Copilot, being indexed in Bing is the entry ticket, and Bing Webmaster Tools is where Microsoft now shows you how often you are cited.

How Copilot uses Bing

Microsoft’s page on web search in Microsoft Copilot lays out the steps:

  1. Copilot reads the prompt and picks out terms where web information would improve the answer.
  2. It generates a search query from those terms. Microsoft says the query is different from the prompt and is a few words long. It does not include the whole prompt unless the prompt is very short.
  3. It sends that query to the Bing search service, with user and tenant identifiers removed.
  4. It uses what Bing returns to compose the response. Microsoft calls this grounding the response in the latest information from the web.

That page is written for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat, the work versions. It says Copilot Chat shows the exact search queries it sent to Bing in the citation section of a response, for 24 hours. That is a useful window into how your buyer’s question was turned into a search.

The practical point: Copilot’s web answers depend on what Bing’s index returns for a short query. If Bing has not indexed your page, or ranks it far down for those few words, Copilot has nothing of yours to ground on.

Which Copilot this describes

The Microsoft Learn page is written for the work versions of Copilot, and some details, such as showing the generated queries, are stated for Copilot Chat only. Microsoft does not publish the same step-by-step description on that page for the consumer Copilot app. The Bing AI Performance report counts citations in Microsoft Copilot generally, so it is the better place to see how the consumer product uses your pages.

The Bing AI Performance report

In February 2026, the Bing Webmaster team announced an AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, as a public preview. It covers how your content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. It shows:

Total citations
How many times your pages were displayed as sources in AI-generated answers over the period you pick.
Average cited pages
The average number of unique pages from your site shown as sources per day. The post says this is not a measure of ranking or authority.
Grounding queries
The key phrases the AI used when it retrieved content that was then cited. The post describes this as a sample, not the full set.
Page-level activity and trends
Citation counts for individual URLs, and a timeline across the supported AI experiences.

Grounding queries are the most useful part for a small site. They are the short searches behind answers that cited you. If the phrases are not the ones your buyers use, your pages are being found for something else.

Google’s comparable report, the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The two reports measure different products, and neither covers ChatGPT or Perplexity.

What the Bing team recommends

The same post lists ways to improve how content is cited. In the Bing team’s words, summarized:

  • Use IndexNow to notify participating search engines when content is added, updated, or removed, so AI systems can reference the current version.
  • Go deeper on topics you are already cited for. Pages cited for specific grounding phrases show a clear focus. Expanding related coverage can build on it.
  • Structure pages clearly. Clear headings, tables, and FAQ sections help surface key information.
  • Add evidence and keep it fresh. Examples, data, and sources build trust. Regular updates keep cited content accurate.
  • Be consistent. Text, images, and video should describe the same things the same way.
  • Local businesses should keep Bing Places for Business current, so AI answers have the right address, hours, and contact details.

This is the closest thing to written guidance any of the large AI search products publishes on citations. It is still a list of good practices, not a list of ranking factors, and the post does not promise results.

IndexNow, briefly

IndexNow is a protocol for telling search engines that a URL was added, changed, or deleted. You host a key file at the root of your site to prove you control it, then send changed URLs to a participating engine’s endpoint. You can send one URL in a simple request, or up to 10,000 in one JSON post. Engines that adopt the protocol agree to share submitted URLs with each other.

The documentation is careful about what a submission means. A 200 response only says the engine received the URL. It does not mean the page will be indexed, and it does not mean Copilot will cite it. The point of IndexNow is to tell engines about a change sooner, instead of waiting for a recrawl.

The controls Bing documents

In a September 2023 post, written when the product was called Bing Chat, Bing described two meta tags:

  • NOCACHE. Content may be included in chat answers, but only the URL, title, and snippet are shown. Only those may be used in training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
  • NOARCHIVE. Content is not included in chat answers and is not linked to in them. It is not used for training those models.

Pages with either tag still appear in Bing search results. Content with both tags is treated as NOCACHE. If you want Copilot to quote you, check that a theme, plugin, or CDN is not adding NOARCHIVE to your pages. It is an easy setting to inherit without noticing.

Bing shows up outside Copilot too

Bing’s index is used by more than Microsoft’s own products. Be careful with how far that goes, because the documentation is narrow:

  • The Bing AI Performance report counts citations in select partner integrations, not only Copilot. The post does not name the partners.
  • OpenAI’s ChatGPT search article says ChatGPT sometimes uses other search providers, and points to Microsoft’s privacy policy as one reference for how providers handle queries. It does not say how much of ChatGPT search comes from Bing.
  • Anthropic’s web search article says Claude picks images from web search results powered by Bing. It says that about images, not about every source Claude cites.

Being indexed in Bing is cheap. For a site that has only ever looked at Google, it is one of the more useful hours you can spend on AI visibility.

A one-hour setup

  1. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.
  2. Check that your homepage, pricing page, and the page that best answers your main buyer question are indexed in Bing. Fix anything that is not.
  3. Check robots.txt and your firewall for anything that blocks Bing’s crawler. The AI search vs SEO guide covers the other AI crawlers at the same time.
  4. Search your templates for NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE.
  5. Set up IndexNow, or check whether your site platform already sends it.
  6. Open the AI Performance report after a few weeks. Read the grounding queries, and compare them with the words on the pages that got cited.
  7. Run your buyer questions in Copilot by hand, with the manual check, so you see the wording as well as the count.

Related: tracking AI traffic in GA4, and showing up in ChatGPT search.

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