How to rank in Microsoft Copilot: a Bing-first playbook
Every Copilot citation starts as a Bing search result. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing, so the work is mostly Bing work: Bingbot must be able to crawl your pages, they must be in Bing's index, and they must rank for the searches Copilot runs behind each answer. Microsoft is also the only major operator we know of that tells site owners how often they are cited. Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report, still labeled a preview in 2026, that shows citation counts and samples of the searches that led Copilot to your pages.
That report turns Copilot from guesswork into something close to normal SEO work. This page shows how to set it up and use it as a content brief. For how Copilot retrieves and displays sources, see RankWave AI's Copilot page.
Get Bing's view of your site in order
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. The quickest route is importing it from Google Search Console, which carries your verified properties and sitemaps across.
- Submit or confirm your sitemap and check the Sitemaps report for errors. The XML sitemap validator catches format problems before Bing does.
- Open the AI Performance report and export the grounding queries and the page-level citations for the last three months.
- Check Bing indexing for your top pages. Use URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools on the pages that matter most. Pages missing from Bing cannot be cited in Copilot, however well they do in Google. The Bing ranking playbook covers the wider Bing work.
- Turn on IndexNow. Microsoft recommends it so Bing learns about new, changed and deleted URLs quickly. Many WordPress plugins and hosts support it; pick one and confirm submissions appear in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Search your templates for
noarchive. Bing treats it as "keep this page out of chat answers". Some SEO plugins offer a site-wide noarchive switch that prints it on every page. - Local businesses: claim or update your Bing Places listing so hours and services in Copilot answers are right.
Turn grounding queries into a content brief
Grounding queries are samples of the searches Copilot issued when it retrieved your content. They are often narrower and more specific than the keywords you track, which is what makes them useful. Work through them like this:
- Group the queries by the page they led to. Each group shows what Copilot believed that page was good for.
- Look for mismatches. A query that landed on a page only loosely related to it means you lack a page that answers it directly. Write one, or add a clearly headed section to the closest page.
- Find thin answers. Where a page is cited for a query but its answer is one vague sentence, expand it with the specifics: numbers, steps, conditions, a small table.
- Watch for new themes. Queries that appear this month but not last month often mark rising questions in your market.
Microsoft's own guidance alongside the report favors clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, claims backed by evidence, and up-to-date information. That lines up with everything else on this site, but here you can see the effect in your own numbers after each edit.
Reading the numbers without fooling yourself
The report counts citations, not clicks, and Microsoft says the totals do not show placement or prominence within an answer. A page cited 200 times as the fifth source may matter less than one cited 20 times as the main source. Grounding queries are a sample, not a full list. And the report covers Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and unnamed partner integrations together, so you cannot attribute a citation to one product.
Use it for direction. Track citations per page before and after each edit, compare against pages you did not change, and pair it with referral data: visits from copilot.microsoft.com and bing.com show which citations turn into traffic. The general routine is on the measurement page.
Copilot in other places
Copilot appears in Windows, the Edge browser, mobile apps and Microsoft 365. Work versions can ground answers in web results through Bing when an organization allows it, and administrators can switch web grounding off. Those answers may cite you with no referral a web analytics tool can see. For B2B sites, that is another reason to rely on the Bing report rather than traffic alone.
Where your influence ends
Copilot decides which Bing results to use for each answer, and Microsoft does not publish how. Bing's ranking still sits underneath everything, so a site that is weak in Bing will be weak in Copilot. The report is a preview and may change. A robots.txt block on Bingbot is too blunt for most goals: it takes you out of Bing's regular results and every service that relies on them, not just Copilot. To keep one page out of answers while leaving it in search, use the noarchive meta value instead. What you control is being indexed, current and the clearest answer to the grounding queries you can see.
Common questions
Does Copilot use my Google rankings?
No. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing's index and rankings. A page can rank well in Google and still be missing from Bing, so check Bing indexing separately.
What is a grounding query?
It is a search Copilot ran in Bing while building an answer that led to your content. Bing Webmaster Tools shows a sample of them in the AI Performance report.
Will IndexNow get me cited faster?
It helps Bing learn about changes sooner, so Copilot can use the current version of a page. It does not guarantee that the page will be cited.