Copilot SEO is making your pages the ones Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI chat cite when they answer. It is closer to ordinary Bing SEO than most AI search work, because Copilot searches Bing’s index to ground its answers. And it has one advantage no other assistant offers: Microsoft gives you a free report of how often you are cited.
StatCounter measures referral share, not search counts[7][8]. Microsoft’s 150 million figure covers all its Copilots, including work and developer tools, not consumer Copilot alone[9].
What Copilot SEO means
Bing AI chat, first launched as Bing Chat, now lives inside Microsoft Copilot, the Microsoft AI chatbot built into Windows, Edge and Bing, alongside the AI-generated summaries in Bing’s own results. Both answer from Bing’s index of the web. So Copilot SEO has two layers: being in that index in good shape, which is Bing SEO, and being the page an answer can lean on, which is what Microsoft calls grounding.
| US desktop | 12.82% |
|---|---|
| Worldwide, all devices | 4.50% |
How Copilot finds its sources
Microsoft’s documentation for Microsoft 365 Copilot describes the mechanism: when web search is on, Copilot parses the prompt and generates a search query that it sends to Bing, a few words informed by the prompt rather than the prompt itself[2]. The answer is then built from what that search returns.
Bing’s search team described what changes when the index serves answers instead of ranked lists. Grounding “builds on the same foundational infrastructure”, the same crawlers and quality signals, but looks for “discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance”. In their words, “Search optimizes for likelihood of relevance. Grounding must measure strength of evidence.”[1]
The report that counts your citations
In February 2026 Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report, in public preview, showing how often your site is cited across “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations”. It reports total citations, average cited pages, a sample of grounding queries and citation activity per page. Bing called it an early step toward GEO tooling[3]. In June 2026 it added intents, topics, a citation share metric and comparisons[4].
What Microsoft says gets cited
Microsoft’s October 2025 guidance is unusually concrete for a search engine. It asks for page titles that “clearly summarize what the content delivers”, “concise answers, one to two sentences that directly address a question”, and “lists, tables, and Q&A blocks that can be lifted cleanly”. It warns: “Don’t hide important answers in tabs or expandable menus: AI systems may not render hidden content”[5].
| Copilot and Bing AI | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | Bing's index | Google's index |
| Citation reporting | AI Performance report, citations only | Search Console Generative AI report, impressions only |
| Clicks reported | ✕No | ✕No |
| Instant indexing | IndexNow | No IndexNow |
| Page-level AI controls | NOCACHE, NOARCHIVE (2023) | nosnippet and related controls |
The AI Overviews guide covers Google’s side. For all the assistants side by side, see the guide to the best AI search engines.
Controlling how Bing uses your page in AI answers
In 2023 Bing documented two options. With NOCACHE, content “may be included in Bing Chat answers” but Bing will “only display URL/Snippet/Title”. With NOARCHIVE, content “will not be included in Bing Chat answers” and is not used for training[6]. Pick what you want below.
Copilot SEO checklist
Questions people ask
What is Microsoft Bing AI chat now called?
Microsoft Copilot. Bing's AI chat, first called Bing Chat, is now part of Copilot, and Bing's own AI-generated summaries appear in Bing search results. Both draw on Bing's index of the web.
How does Copilot choose which websites to cite?
It searches Bing. Microsoft's documentation for Microsoft 365 Copilot says it generates a search query from your prompt and sends it to Bing. Bing describes grounding as finding discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance, and judging strength of evidence rather than only relevance.
Can I see how often Copilot cites my site?
Yes. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, that shows total citations, cited pages and sample grounding queries across Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partners. It does not show clicks.
Is Copilot SEO different from Bing SEO?
It builds on it. Copilot uses Bing's index, crawlers and quality signals, so a page that is not indexed in Bing cannot be cited. On top of that, Microsoft recommends short direct answers, clear structure and answers that are not hidden in tabs.
How do I stop Copilot from using my content?
Bing documented two meta tag options in 2023: NOCACHE, which limits your page to a link, title and snippet in AI answers, and NOARCHIVE, which keeps it out of AI answers and training. Blocking Bingbot in robots.txt removes you from Bing search too, so use it with care.
How many people use Copilot?
Microsoft has not published a figure for consumer Copilot. In October 2025 it said its family of Copilots and agents, including work and developer products, had surpassed 150 million monthly active users.