Stop the presses, Microsoft just did something useful! They’ve only gone and launched an AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools that shows exactly how your content appears in AI-generated answers across Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and their partner integrations.
For the first time, you can see which of your pages are being cited by AI, which queries triggered those citations, and whether your visibility is trending up or down over time.
This is a B.I.G. D.E.A.L. – not because Bing is suddenly going to send you floods of traffic (it probably won’t), but because it’s the first real data we’ve had on AI citations from any major search platform.
What the new AI Citations report shows you
The AI Performance dashboard breaks things down into a few key areas:
Total citations
How many times your content was shown as a source in AI answers during whatever time period you’ve selected. It’s not telling you how prominently you appeared or where you ranked in the answer – just that you were referenced.
Average cited pages
The average number of different pages from your site that get cited each day. If one page is doing all the work, you’ll know. If your citations are spread across your site, that’s interesting too.
Grounding queries
These are the phrases the AI used when it went looking for content to cite. They’re not the exact questions users typed in, but they give you a sense of what topics AI thinks you’re relevant for.
The screenshot below shows what this report looks like – I’ve obscured some data, for obvious reasons.
Page-level citation activity
This shows which specific URLs from your site are getting cited most often. This is really useful because you can see exactly which content AI systems find trustworthy enough to reference.
Why this matters for your business
I’ve written shitloads about GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) being the same as SEO with a fancy new name. That hasn’t changed. The fundamentals are still the same – create helpful content, structure it clearly, keep it accurate and up to date.
But what HAS been missing is any way to measure whether your SEO efforts are translating into AI visibility. Until now, you had to guess. Or pay for third-party tools that were essentially sampling and estimating.
This report gives you actual first-party data. Yes, it’s only Bing and Copilot – Google still hasn’t given us anything similar in Search Console. But if your content is performing well in Microsoft’s AI systems, there’s a reasonable chance the same principles apply elsewhere.
How to find the AI Performance report
Log into Bing Webmaster Tools, select your site, and you’ll see AI Performance in the left-hand menu underneath Search Performance.
If you don’t have Bing Webmaster Tools set up yet, now’s a good time. It’s free, takes about ten minutes, and you’ll get data you literally can’t get anywhere else right now.
If you’re looking at all this thinking “I have no idea what to do with this information” – that’s fair. Book a 1:1 with me and we’ll go through your specific situation together.
