Microsoft Copilot cites the pages it pulls from Bing, so getting cited by Copilot starts with Bing, not Google. When web search is on, Copilot turns the user’s prompt into a short search query of a few words, sends it to the Bing search service, and writes its answer from what comes back, with links to the sources. A page Bing has not indexed cannot be one of them. The work, in order: get your pages into Bing’s index and keep bingbot unblocked, push every change through IndexNow, win the short query Copilot is likely to send, write passages that can be lifted whole, and read your real Copilot citations in the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools.
One thing to know before you read on: Cituna does not track Microsoft Copilot. It tracks seven other engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. For Copilot, the measurement tool is Microsoft’s own report, covered below.
How Copilot finds the pages it cites
Microsoft documents the mechanism for its workplace product, and it is worth reading closely. According to Microsoft’s page on web search in Copilot (updated August 18, 2026), Copilot parses the prompt, picks out the terms where web information would help, and generates a search query from them. That query is not the user’s prompt. It is a few words, such as a company name followed by “strategy” or “financials” in Microsoft’s own examples. Copilot sends it to the Bing search service and uses what comes back to compose the reply.
Three consequences follow for anyone who wants to be cited:
- Bing’s ranking for a short phrase decides the shortlist. If your page does not come up in Bing for the few words Copilot sends, it is not in the pool the answer is written from. Long, conversational prompts are boiled down before retrieval.
- The answer shows its search. In Microsoft Copilot Chat (the workplace chat, formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat), the citation section of a response shows the exact web search queries that were sent to Bing. Microsoft says those queries stay available in the chat thread for 24 hours. Ask your buyer question, open the citations, and you can see the phrase you need to rank for.
- Web search can be off. In organisations, IT admins can turn web search on or off with a policy, and users have a Web content toggle. With it off, Copilot includes no web content in its responses. Nothing on your site changes that.
Bing Webmaster Tools uses the same idea in its reports: a grounding query is a key phrase the AI used when it retrieved content that was later cited in an answer.
How Copilot differs from the other engines
The general advice for answer engines still applies: crawlable pages, direct answers, trust earned on other sites. What changes with Copilot is the plumbing underneath. The table keeps to what each company’s own documentation states.
| Microsoft Copilot | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | ChatGPT search | Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search it answers from | The Bing search service | Google Search’s index | ChatGPT’s search features | Perplexity search |
| Crawler to allow | bingbot | Googlebot | OAI-SearchBot | PerplexityBot |
| Fast change notification | IndexNow, which Bing accepts | Not an IndexNow participant | Not stated in its docs | Not stated in its docs |
| Owner’s report of AI appearances | AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (citations) | Generative AI performance report in Search Console (impressions) | Not stated in its docs | Not stated in its docs |
Sources, read October 9, 2026: Microsoft’s Copilot web search page and Bing’s AI Performance posts; Google’s AI features page and its Search Console help page for the Generative AI performance report; OpenAI’s and Perplexity’s crawler pages; the IndexNow FAQ. Of the seven engines Cituna tracks (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode), the table leaves out Gemini, Claude and Grok.
The last row is where Copilot stands out. Microsoft gives publishers a first-party count of how often their pages are cited in its AI answers. Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console, rolled out to all websites as of August 31, 2026, counts impressions of links to your site in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s AI features page adds that there are no extra technical requirements: a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and Googlebot is the crawler that controls access. OpenAI’s crawler page and Perplexity’s crawler page describe which bot to allow, and neither describes a report of your citations.
Step 1: Get into Bing’s index and keep bingbot in
Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your XML sitemap there. Then search Bing for your key pages by URL or exact title. If they do not appear, Copilot cannot cite them, however good they are.
Check robots.txt for rules that block bingbot by accident. A file written years ago with only Googlebot in mind, or a blanket rule for “other bots”, can shut out Bing without anyone deciding to. Bing’s crawler documentation lists bingbot as its standard crawler and notes that user-agent strings are easy to spoof, so confirm a request really is Bing before acting on it. Our guide to finding AI bots in your server logs walks through reading the log and checking that a bot is genuine; the same method works for bingbot.
Two robots meta values matter on Bing. When Bing announced controls for Bing Chat, the product that became Copilot, it said in a September 2023 post that content tagged NOARCHIVE would not be included in Bing Chat answers or linked from them, and that content tagged NOCACHE could be included with only the URL, title and snippet shown. A page carrying both tags is treated as NOCACHE. Bing announced these rules for Bing Chat, so if you added either tag to keep pages out of caches, check whether you meant to limit how Bing’s AI answers use them too.
Step 2: Push every change through IndexNow
Copilot cites what Bing has stored. A page you rewrote last week can still be read in its old form until Bing crawls it again. IndexNow closes that gap: your site notifies participating engines when a URL is added, updated or removed. In its February 2026 announcement of AI Performance, Bing names IndexNow as the way to help AI systems reference the current version of a page.
From the IndexNow documentation and FAQ, read on October 9, 2026:
- You create a key of 8 to 128 characters (letters, numbers and dashes) and host it as a UTF-8 text file at your site root, or elsewhere on the host with a keyLocation parameter, which then limits the key to URLs under that path.
- One URL can go in a simple GET request. A JSON POST takes up to 10,000 URLs at once.
- A 200 means the URL was submitted and a 202 means it was received with the key still to be validated. A 403 means the key is invalid or missing, a 422 means the URLs do not belong to your host, and a 429 means you are sending too often.
- Submitting to one participating engine shares it with the others. The FAQ lists Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. Google is not among them.
- A submission does not guarantee immediate indexing. Each engine still makes its own crawl decision.
Most CMSs and CDNs offer IndexNow as a plugin or a setting, so wiring it in is usually a configuration task, not a build. Our guide on getting AI engines to recrawl updated content covers the other engines, where there is no equivalent notification.
Step 3: Win the short query Copilot sends
Because Copilot shortens the prompt before it searches, the target is the short phrase, not the full question. For each buyer question you care about, ask Microsoft Copilot Chat, open the citations within 24 hours, and note the query it sent to Bing. Without a work account, use the grounding queries in Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report instead. Then search that phrase in Bing and look at what ranks.
If your page is not on the first results page for that phrase, treat it as a Bing ranking job. Microsoft’s October 2025 guidance on inclusion in AI search answers says the page title, the H1 and the meta description should line up, which is also what helps a page rank for a precise phrase. A page whose title talks around the topic loses to one that names it.
Step 4: Write passages Copilot can lift
That same Microsoft post, written by a principal product manager at Microsoft Bing, is the closest thing to a first-party style guide for Copilot. Its points, in our words:
- Use H2 and H3 headings that mark one idea each, and use lists, numbered steps and comparison tables where the content has that shape.
- Write sentences that make sense when pulled out of the page, and do not pack several claims into one line.
- Anchor claims in measurable facts rather than words like “innovative”.
- Do not hide key answers in tabs or expandable menus, in PDFs, or only inside images.
- Add JSON-LD structured data to label products, reviews, FAQs and events.
The February 2026 Bing post adds a short list for pages that are indexed but less often cited: go deeper on the topic, use clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, support claims with evidence, keep the page current, and make text, images and video describe the same entities consistently.
Step 5: Read your Copilot citations in Bing Webmaster Tools
AI Performance, in public preview since February 10, 2026, shows how your content appears as a source across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. It sits in Bing Webmaster Tools, so the site has to be verified there. It reports:
- Total citations: how many times your content was shown as a source in the period.
- Average cited pages: how many unique pages of yours were shown as sources per day.
- Grounding queries: the key phrases the AI used when it retrieved your cited content. Bing says this is a sample.
- Page-level citation activity: citation counts per URL.
- Visibility trends over time.
On June 16, 2026, Bing added four preview views. Intents classifies grounding queries into categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation and Local. Topics groups related grounding queries into themes. Citation Share is your percentage of all citations shown for one grounding query. Compare overlays an earlier period on the current one.
What the report does not say
Bing is explicit that citation counts do not indicate placement, ranking or a page’s importance within an answer, and that Citation Share is an observational metric, not a ranking or a competitive scoreboard: it does not show which other domains were cited.
Use it to find what already works. A page with many citations shows the format Copilot rewards for your topic. A grounding query where your citation share is low names the next page to improve.
Step 6: Be present where Copilot’s searches land
Like every answer engine, Copilot leans on pages other than yours: reviews, comparison articles, forums, news and reference sites. Whatever Bing ranks for your short query is what Copilot reads, so being named on those pages counts as much as your own. Our guide to earning citations from third-party websites covers how to get included without paying for placements that do not last.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and public LinkedIn articles and company pages can rank in Bing like any other page. Microsoft has not said that Copilot gives LinkedIn extra weight, so treat it as one more place your category is discussed, not a shortcut. For a local business, Bing’s February 2026 post points to Bing Places for Business to keep the address, hours and contact details current for location questions.
What Cituna does and does not cover here
Cituna does not ask Microsoft Copilot your prompts and has no Copilot data. For Copilot, Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report is the source to use, and it has the advantage of being Microsoft’s own count. Cituna’s free AI visibility checker tests eight AI user agents against your robots.txt; bingbot is not one of them, so check Bing access in Bing Webmaster Tools.
What Cituna does is the same job for the seven engines it tracks: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. It asks your buyer questions on all seven every day, records whether each answer names you, links you or names a rival, shows the pages each engine read, and writes the fix for each gap, with Google Search Console joined in so a gain can be tied to clicks. Plans start at $39 a month for 10 prompts on one brand. The engine-by-engine playbooks start with how to get cited by ChatGPT.
Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.