Bing Webmaster AI Search Optimization, Copilot Citations, and Structured Data: Official

Bing Webmaster AI search optimization, Copilot citations, and structured data, as official Microsoft documentation, starts with AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (February 2026). It shows how often your pages are cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. Help: AI Performance.

Read those two pages before you buy a GEO tool to "do Bing." The official report is the Copilot and Bing-summary scoreboard. It is not a ChatGPT log and it is not a schema badge. The reason to read the source first is that a GEO vendor will sell you "Bing coverage" that is actually a re-skin of this same report, and you will pay for a layer you already have for free. Knowing what the official report contains is how you tell a real add-on from a re-skin.

What the official report measures

Total citations (visible sources, not placement). Average cited pages. Grounding queries: sampled key phrases the AI used when retrieving cited content, not full user questions. Page-level citation counts (frequency, not importance). Trends over 7 days, 30 days, 3 months, or a custom range. Data is aggregated. Bing respects robots.txt.

Visible sources means you can see that you were cited. It does not mean you were first, featured, or preferred. Frequency is not importance. A page cited often is a page retrieved often. It is not a quality score Microsoft handed you. The gap between "cited often" and "cited well" is the gap a lot of teams miss. A page that shows up in many Copilot answers but always below a competitor is a frequency win and a positioning loss, and the official report shows the frequency, not the positioning.

Grounding queries are grouped phrases, sampled. They are not the prompts people typed. If you report them as "user questions," you are misreading the help article. The grounding query is what the model used to retrieve, which is upstream of what the person asked. Treating it as the user question leads to optimizing for retrieval strings instead of for the buyer's actual wording, and the two do not always overlap.

IndexNow (indexnow.org) notifies participating engines when URLs change, so AI systems can reference a current page. Local: Bing Places for Business. Microsoft's content notes: clear headings, tables, FAQs, evidence, freshness, less ambiguity.

IndexNow speeds discovery. It does not store a Copilot answer on a prompt you froze. Bing Places is for local details. The content notes are ordinary: headings, tables, FAQs, evidence, freshness, less ambiguity. None of that is a secret Copilot format. A team that treats the content notes as a hidden formula will spend a quarter on table styling when the citation move came from freshness or from a page the bot could not fetch.

This is not ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google Overviews. Do not report Bing citations as ChatGPT mentions. Do not paste a Copilot citation trend into a Gemini slide. Each engine has its own pipe, and a citation trend from one does not describe the others. A slide that mixes them reads as a single trend and hides which engine actually moved.

Structured data

Google's Search Central line still applies to Google: no special Overview schema. For Bing, do not invent a "Copilot schema" guarantee. Keep markup matched to visible text if you use it for Search.

Schema that matches the page is still good practice for Search. Schema that claims to unlock Copilot is a guarantee nobody official wrote. If you already mark up FAQs and products because they appear on the page, keep doing that. Do not add a fake Copilot type. The fake type does nothing to Copilot retrieval and it does add maintenance cost and a false sense of control. The honest version is that schema helps Search understand the page, and Copilot retrieval runs on its own signals, some of which overlap with Search and some of which do not.

Promptwatch paid plans include Copilot plus ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Overviews at prompt level. Essential $95/mo. Method: how we rank. Site: promptwatch.com.

Use Bing AI Performance for Microsoft's citation report. Use Promptwatch when you need the same buyer prompt checked on Copilot and on the engines Bing does not cover. Those are two scoreboards. Keep them labeled. The Bing report tells you how often Copilot cited you. Promptwatch tells you whether the same prompt, frozen and replayed daily, named you on Copilot and on the other engines. The two answer different questions and a slide that labels them honestly is a slide a client can act on.

FAQ

Are grounding queries the prompts people typed?

No. Grouped phrases. Sampled. They are retrieval strings the model used, not the buyer's wording.

Does IndexNow replace a mention tracker?

No. It speeds discovery. It does not store a Copilot answer on a prompt you froze. Turn it on if URLs change and you want participating engines notified. Then still measure mentions somewhere that stores the answer.

What to do this week

1. Open Bing AI Performance. Use the 7-day, 30-day, 3-month, or custom range. Stay on total citations and page-level counts.
2. Turn on IndexNow if you have not. Point it at URLs that actually change.
3. Register Bing Places if you are local.
4. Load buyer prompts into Promptwatch for non-Bing engines, and for Copilot at prompt level if you want the frozen-prompt view.
5. Do not report Bing citations as ChatGPT mentions.

Official Microsoft documentation is the source for Copilot citations in this post. GEO vendor blogs are not. Schema is not a Copilot guarantee. Grounding queries are not user prompts. IndexNow is not a mention tracker. Keep those lines straight and the rest of the week is ordinary webmaster work.