Bing AI Performance report: reading Copilot citation data

It's one of the few first-party views of AI citations any search engine offers, so it's worth reading carefully and not over-reading. This guide covers what the report measures, what grounding queries are, the four features added on June 16, 2026, Bing's own caveats, and a practical routine for reading the data and acting on it.

What is the Bing AI Performance report?

The AI Performance report is a section of Bing Webmaster Tools that shows where your site is cited in AI-generated answers on Microsoft's surfaces. Microsoft's February 10, 2026 launch post calls it "a new set of insights that shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations", and "an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools" (Bing Webmaster Blog). GEO (generative engine optimization) means making your content visible in answers written by generative AI; our GEO guide covers the wider practice.

To open it, sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, select a verified site and choose AI Performance in the left menu. Data appears only for sites you've verified, and Bing says it "is refreshed daily, with a short processing delay" (Bing).

What does the AI Performance report measure?

The AI Performance report measures visible citations: each time a page from your site is shown as a source in an AI-generated answer. As of October 2026, Bing's AI Performance help page defines these measures:

Other details from the same page:

• Date ranges: 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, or a custom range within the available history.
• Grounding Query - Page Mapping: select a grounding query to see the pages cited for it, or select a page to see its grounding queries. You can filter by only one at a time, and exports reflect the current filter.
• Exports: grounding queries with citation counts, page-level citations and time-series metrics, "in CSV and Excel formats."

Bing adds a warning that's easy to skip: "AI Performance does not measure rankings, authority, performance, or importance. It simply shows which content was cited."

What are grounding queries?

Grounding queries are short, grouped phrases that show what the AI searched for when it retrieved and cited your content. Microsoft explains that in AI answers, "grounding refers to the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response" (Bing Search Blog). The grounding query is the retrieval phrase behind that step.

What they are and aren't, per Bing's help page:

• They are "grouped representations" of retrieval activity. "They are not full user questions or prompts."
• Bing's example: content cited in answers about solar energy "may appear under grounding queries such as "solar energy" or "solar panels.""
• One grounding query can map to several of your pages, and one page can appear under several grounding queries.
• Short or vague phrases are expected, and no grounding queries at all usually means low citation activity: Bing says this "is expected and does not indicate a penalty or exclusion."

What did the June 2026 update add to AI Performance?

On June 16, 2026, Microsoft added four preview features to the report: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare (Bing Search Blog). The help page's FAQ describes each one:

Three caveats from Bing on these features:

• Intent and topic labels come from "AI/ML classifiers", and some labels may not match how you'd describe the query, "particularly for ambiguous or multi-intent queries."
• Citation Share "does not expose competitor domain names or identify which other sites hold the remaining share."
• Compare "shows what changed between two periods, but it does not explain why the change happened."

What can't the AI Performance report tell you?

The AI Performance report can't tell you about traffic, rankings, causes, or any AI engine outside Microsoft's surfaces. Bing's help page is direct about the limits:

• Citations aren't clicks. Asked whether citations represent clicks or traffic, Bing answers: "No. A citation indicates that your content was visibly referenced or shown in an AI-generated answer. It does not represent traffic, clicks, or user engagement." Use Search Performance for Bing clicks.
• It's a sample. "The data shown represents a sample of overall citation activity." "Very low or infrequent citation activity may not surface", and totals can differ between views.
• No causation. Trends "reflect aggregated citation activity only and cannot be attributed to a specific cause or event."
• Indexing comes first. A page has to be in Bing's index, the library it answers from, before it can be cited: "As with Bing search, AI Performance reflects only content that is eligible for indexing."
• Microsoft's surfaces only. The report covers Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and partner integrations Microsoft doesn't name, so don't read it as covering ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Gemini. For those you need a third-party tracker, compared in how to track AI visibility.

Bing lists the forces that move citation counts: "user demand, content freshness, model updates, partner refresh cycles, and shifts in the topics users ask about." Most of those are outside your control. Being indexed makes a page eligible; whether it's cited is still each answer's call.

If the pages you most want cited never appear in the report, start by confirming they're indexed at all; you can check them on Google for free and use URL Inspection for Bing.

How do you read the AI Performance report and act on it?

Read the report as a monthly pattern check: find which pages and themes get cited, find important pages that don't, fix eligibility problems first, then improve content and watch the trend. This routine fits Bing's own guidance:

1. Export the last 3 months of page-level citations and grounding queries. Bing's sampling means a longer range gives a steadier picture.
2. List the pages you most want cited (pricing, comparisons, key guides) and mark which ones appear in the export.
3. For pages that never appear, check eligibility. Inspect them in URL Inspection to confirm they're indexed; if not, work through why Bing isn't indexing a page. Then check for the directives below that limit Copilot.
4. Read grounding queries, Topics and Intents for gaps. Bing suggests that if you "expect to see citation activity for Research queries but mostly see Informational ones", the page may need more depth or evidence.
5. When you make a real update, tell Bing through IndexNow (an open "this page changed" notice that Bing and other participating engines accept; Google doesn't use it). Microsoft's launch post says IndexNow "helps ensure that AI systems reference the most current version of a page" (Bing Webmaster Blog). The steps are in how to submit URLs to Bing.
6. Use Compare after 30 days, current period against the prior one, and read the result as an observation, not evidence that the update caused it.

Check for directives that limit Copilot

Some robots directives don't block indexing but do limit how Copilot can use a page. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines say, as of October 2026:

• "NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results."
• "NOCACHE limits Copilot to using only the URL, title, and snippet, reducing citation depth and answer quality."
• "DATA-NOSNIPPET and NOSNIPPET prevent Bing from displaying captions and may limit Copilot citation quality."

This short script looks for those directives in a page's X-Robots-Tag header and robots meta tags, fetching as Bingbot's user agent:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# copilot-directives.sh <url>: flags directives Bing says limit Copilot use
url="$1"; ua="Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
hdr=$(curl -sI -A "$ua" "$url" | grep -i '^x-robots-tag' | tr -d '\r')
body=$(curl -s -A "$ua" "$url")
meta=$(echo "$body" | grep -o -i -E '<meta[^>]+name="(robots|bingbot)"[^>]*>')
echo "URL: $url"
for d in noindex noarchive nocache nosnippet; do
  hit=$(printf '%s\n%s\n' "$hdr" "$meta" | grep -i -c "$d")
  echo "  $d: $([ "$hit" -gt 0 ] && echo FOUND || echo not found)"
done
echo "  data-nosnippet attributes: $(echo "$body" | grep -o -i 'data-nosnippet' | wc -l | tr -d ' ')"

We ran it on our own About page on October 17, 2026:

URL: https://freshlycited.com/about
  noindex: not found
  noarchive: not found
  nocache: not found
  nosnippet: not found
  data-nosnippet attributes: 0

If a page you want cited shows noarchive or nocache, that's worth fixing before you read anything into its citation count. Directives can come from a page template or a server header, so check one page from each template, not just one page.

How does AI Performance fit with other AI visibility tools?

AI Performance is first-party data for Microsoft's AI surfaces, so it's the most direct source for Copilot citations, and it isn't a view of other engines. Other answer engines draw on other indexes; where AI search gets its sources maps which uses which. For ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features, third-party trackers sample answers to a set of prompts; our list of AI visibility tools compares them. A sensible setup uses AI Performance for Microsoft and one tracker for the rest.

For how IndexNow connects to Copilot and what the public evidence says, see IndexNow, Bing and AI answers. For why updated pages matter to AI answers in general, see content freshness for AI search.

Where does FreshlyCited fit?

FreshlyCited covers the indexing step that comes before any citation, not the citations themselves, and its main job is Google: it checks which URLs Google already sees, pushes only the ones Google hasn't indexed, then re-checks on days 1, 3 and 7. For sites you verify with an IndexNow key, every push of URLs on that site also goes out through IndexNow, shown as "Sent to Bing", at no extra cost and with a per-site off switch. FreshlyCited doesn't check Bing's index and doesn't measure Copilot citations; the AI Performance report and URL Inspection are where you see those.

Nobody can promise a citation. What you can do is help your updated pages get found and indexed: check your pages free, and send your next update to Google and, for verified sites, to Bing in the same push.