Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance answers a question publishers have been asking since AI answers appeared on results pages: is my content being used, and where? Until now the only evidence was anecdotal: someone spots their site in a Copilot answer, takes a screenshot, and guesses at the pattern. The new report replaces the guessing with counts, at least for Microsoft’s own surfaces.
It is useful. It is also easy to over-read, because the numbers look like search performance data and are not.
What Bing launched
Bing announced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview on 10 February 2026. It reports citations of your site across three surfaces: Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations.
“Public preview” matters. The report is new, its definitions may change, and anything you build on it, from client dashboards to internal targets, should expect revisions.
What the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report shows
The report has five views. Each answers a slightly different question.
| View | What it counts | Use it to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Total Citations | How often your site was cited in AI answers | Is my content being used at all? |
| Average Cited Pages | Unique pages cited per day | Is it one page or many? |
| Grounding Queries | “Key phrases the AI used when retrieving content” | What topics pull my pages in? |
| Page-level citation activity | Citations by individual URL | Which pages does the AI rely on? |
| Visibility trends | Citation activity over time | Is it rising or falling? |
The page-level view is the most practical. A short list of pages that attract most citations tells you which content an AI system finds useful for grounding its answers. Those pages are worth keeping accurate and current, because errors there are repeated to people who may never visit.
Read Total Citations and Average Cited Pages together. A high citation count spread across few pages means a handful of URLs carry your AI visibility, and losing one of them would show up sharply. A similar count spread across many pages is more resilient. Neither number alone tells you which situation you are in.
What the report does not show
The report does not show clicks, and it does not show rankings. Bing is explicit that the data “does not indicate ranking, authority, or the role of any page within an individual answer.” A citation might be the main source of an answer or one link among several in a footnote. The report does not distinguish.
That is the received wisdom to challenge. It is tempting to treat citations as the AI equivalent of impressions and build a click-through rate on top. You cannot: there is no click count to divide by, and a citation is not a position. A rising citation count with falling traffic is entirely possible, for the reasons we set out in zero-click searches and AI Overviews and traffic.
Grounding queries are not search queries
Grounding queries are easy to misread. Bing defines them as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content. They are not necessarily what a user typed. An AI system may rewrite a long conversational prompt into several short retrieval phrases, so a grounding query is closer to the system’s own search than to the person’s question.
Treat them as a topic signal rather than a keyword list. If grounding queries cluster around a subject you cover thinly, that is a hint your pages are being used for something they only half answer.
They are also worth comparing with the queries your pages rank for in ordinary search. Where the two lists overlap, your content is doing the same job in both places. Where grounding queries cover topics that never appear in your search data, the AI is finding a use for your pages that searchers have not, and that is worth knowing before you rewrite or prune them.
How to add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools
The report sits inside Bing Webmaster Tools, so the first step is to add and verify your site there if you have not. Bing offers several verification methods, including importing sites you have already verified in Google Search Console, which is the quickest route for most people. Once the site is verified, AI Performance appears alongside the existing search reports.
Keep the two kinds of report apart when you read them. Bing’s search performance data shows clicks and impressions from Bing search; AI Performance shows citations. They answer different questions, much as Search Console and Google Analytics do on Google’s side.
Controlling whether AI uses your content
Bing says it respects content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported controls. If the report shows pages cited that you would rather keep out of AI answers, those controls are where to act. Our guide to robots.txt for SEO covers the mechanics and the difference between blocking crawling and blocking indexing.
Think before blocking. A citation does not guarantee a click, but a page that is never cited has no chance of one, and the report is the first data that lets you weigh the two. If a page is cited heavily but sends little Bing traffic, the fix may be to make the page more worth visiting, with tools, data or depth an answer cannot reproduce, rather than to hide it.
The limits of citation data
The main limitation is scope. The report covers Microsoft’s surfaces and select partners only. It tells you nothing about how other AI assistants or Google’s AI features use your content, and Bing’s share of searches may not reflect your audience. Do not extrapolate from it to AI visibility in general.
The second limitation is meaning. Because the data does not indicate ranking, authority or role within an answer, a citation count is a measure of use, not of value. Two sites with the same count may have very different outcomes: one cited as the main source with a prominent link, another as a minor reference that nobody notices.
Used within those limits, the report is worth checking monthly. Watch which pages gain or lose citations, compare the trend with your Bing search traffic for the same pages, and look at grounding queries for topics where your coverage is thin. Treat it as a new input into content decisions, not as a scoreboard. And keep an eye on its preview status, because definitions that change mid-series will break any comparison over time.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools?
A report, launched as a public preview on 10 February 2026, that shows how often your site is cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.
Does the AI Performance report show clicks?
No. It shows citations, cited pages, grounding queries and trends. Bing says the data does not indicate ranking, authority or the role of any page within an answer.
What are grounding queries?
Bing describes them as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content. They are not necessarily what the user typed.
Can I stop Bing’s AI from citing my pages?
Bing says it respects content owner preferences set through robots.txt and other supported controls.
The takeaway AI Performance tells you where Microsoft’s AI answers use your pages. It does not tell you what that use is worth, so read citations as a measure of use, not of traffic or rank.
