Copilot SEO: how to get cited in Microsoft Copilot, and how to measure it in Bing's AI Performance report.

What is Copilot SEO?

Copilot SEO means earning citations in Microsoft Copilot and in the AI-generated summaries in Bing. It starts with ordinary Bing SEO, because Copilot's web answers are grounded in Bing, then adds pages built to be quoted and a measurement loop in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report. Rankings alone don't tell you whether Copilot cites you.

Copilot is Bing's AI chat under a new name. On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced that "Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are becoming Copilot." The link to Bing still matters for site owners: the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations in Microsoft Copilot, in AI summaries in Bing, and in select partner integrations.

Microsoft argues the reach goes further. In a February 12, 2026 post, Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's corporate vice president for search and AI, wrote that Microsoft grounding "powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market." Treat that as Microsoft's claim, but it explains why Bing has started to talk about visibility as something that is "not only about blue links."

How does Copilot choose which pages to cite?

Copilot cites pages that Bing has crawled and indexed and that answer the question in a clear, checkable way. Microsoft describes grounding as the system that connects AI to "current, authoritative information," and says AI retrievers favor "structured, verifiable, and applicable content." Short, self-contained sections are the easiest to lift into an answer.

Microsoft's most practical advice came from Krishna Madhavan, a principal product manager at Bing, in an October 2025 post for advertisers and publishers. AI assistants, he wrote, break pages into smaller sections instead of reading them top to bottom. So the section has to stand on its own: a specific heading, an answer in the first lines, and the supporting detail after it.

The foundations haven't changed either. "Crawlability, metadata, internal linking, and backlinks remain essential," the same post says. If Bingbot can't reach a page, or the answer only appears after JavaScript runs, there is nothing to cite. Our guide to AI crawlers in robots.txt covers the crawler rules, and the technical setup we recommend includes Bing Webmaster Tools with IndexNow, a protocol its site describes as "a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted."

What does Bing's AI Performance report show?

Bing's AI Performance report shows how often your pages are cited in AI answers: total citations, the average number of your pages cited per day, the grounding queries behind those citations, and citations by page. Bing launched it in public preview on February 10, 2026, and has added a feature roughly every four months since.

Read every number as a signal, not a ranking. Bing says Total Citations doesn't show where a citation appears in an answer, Average Cited Pages doesn't indicate ranking or authority, and grounding queries are a sample. Citation Share is, in Bing's words, "an observational metric," not "a competitive scoreboard," and it doesn't expose which other domains were cited.

The report doesn't replace your own checks of what Copilot says. It tells you which pages get cited and for which queries; it won't tell you whether the answer described your product correctly. Pair it with a prompt panel, as in our 30-prompt method for tracking ChatGPT mentions by hand, run in Copilot.

What is Topics Portfolio, and how do you use it?

Topics Portfolio, in beta since October 13, 2026, "groups the grounding queries where your site appears into broader thematic clusters." For each topic it shows the approximate size in citations across all sites, how many sites are cited, and how many queries it holds. It also lists opportunity queries: strong queries where other sites are cited and yours isn't.

Bing's definitions are worth reading closely, because they shape what you can do with the view:

• Topic Size is "the approximate total citations across all sites for this topic over the selected period," so it measures demand in AI answers, not your share of it.
• Sites Cited is roughly how many sites appear for the topic's queries, which tells you how crowded the topic is.
• Top Opportunity Queries are "the strongest queries across your whole portfolio where other sites appear and yours does not."

Bing suggests a simple order: start with the topics where your citations are already concentrated, then work through the opportunity queries. For a B2B SaaS site, that usually means:

1. Pick the two or three topics closest to what you sell, and ignore topics that only touch your blog's side subjects.
2. For each opportunity query, find the page on your site that should answer it. If there isn't one, that is a content brief.
3. Rewrite the relevant section so it answers the query in the first two sentences, then supports it with steps, a table, or a number.
4. Check the next period against this one with Compare, and reread Topics Portfolio at its one, two, or three-month window.

Two limits apply. Bing shows the feature only "if there is sufficient data for your site," so smaller sites may see few topics or none. And the topic labels are AI-generated; Bing warns that classification is imperfect and that branded queries can show up as opportunities. Use the thumbs up and down buttons to flag bad topics.

What should you change on your pages to get cited in Copilot?

Make each answer easy to find, lift, and trust. Microsoft's own guidance asks for aligned titles, H1s, and descriptions, specific H2 and H3 headings, Q&A blocks, lists or tables, and concise answers that can be lifted directly. It also asks for schema markup in JSON-LD, and warns against hiding answers where AI systems may not read them.

Two of those warnings hit B2B SaaS sites hard. Pricing details and feature comparisons often live in accordions, and security and compliance answers often live in PDFs. Move the short answer into the HTML and keep the PDF as the long version.

On schema, Microsoft says it "helps search engines and AI systems understand your content." Our review of schema markup for AI search covers what the evidence supports and what we implement anyway.

How do you keep pages out of Copilot answers?

Use Bing's NOARCHIVE robots meta tag on the pages you want left out. In September 2023, Bing said content tagged NOARCHIVE "will not be included in Bing Chat answers," the product now called Copilot, and won't be used to train Microsoft's generative AI models. The page still appears in Bing search results.

Bing offered a middle option at the same time. With NOCACHE, a page "may be included in Bing Chat answers," but only its URL, title, and snippet are used, and only those may be used for training. If a page carries both tags, Bing treats it as NOCACHE.

For most B2B SaaS marketing pages, opting out costs more than it saves: being cited is the point. It can make sense for paid research, gated assets, or pages with terms that change by contract. Bing's current help page on robots meta tags only loads with JavaScript, so check it in a browser before you rely on the 2023 wording.

We run AEO and GEO programs for B2B SaaS companies, so we have an interest in the topic. Our AEO and GEO program includes Bing Webmaster Tools and the monthly prompt report, and our guide to tracking AI traffic in GA4 covers visits from Copilot.

Questions about Copilot SEO