Bing’s AI Performance Report: The Only Free Source of Real AI Citation Data, and How to Read Grounding Queries

Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report is the only free, first-party report that shows when an AI answer actually cited your pages. It counts citations across Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI-generated summaries and unnamed partner integrations, lists which of your URLs were cited, and shows the “grounding queries” behind them: the phrases the AI searched with. It shows no clicks, the query list is a sample, and the whole report is still a preview. To use it, import your site from Google Search Console, then use grounding queries to see which page each topic leans on, and improve that page.

Microsoft has expanded the report twice since February, most recently today: on 13 October 2026 it announced a Topics Portfolio beta. Everything below comes from Microsoft’s own posts, read on 13 October 2026. Bing’s help pages render only with JavaScript and gave us no readable text, so the few details that come from third-party walkthroughs are labelled.

Why it is the one report that shows citations

Google’s report counts impressions: a link to you was shown. GA4 counts visits. Bing’s report counts the times your page was displayed as a source in an AI answer, which Microsoft calls “an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools”.

Be precise about coverage. Microsoft names Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and “select partner integrations”, and does not name the partners. Microsoft has made broad claims elsewhere: a June 2025 post says Bing powers “AI tools like ChatGPT and Inflection.ai”, and a February 2026 post goes further:

And today, Microsoft grounding powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market.

That is a vendor claim, not a description of this report. Nothing Microsoft has published says ChatGPT citations are counted here, so never present these numbers as ChatGPT data.

How to set up Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
2. If the site is already verified in Google Search Console, import it: on My Sites click Import (Bing’s 2025 guide also offers it under Add a Site), sign in with Google, click Allow, select the sites and click Import. Imported sites are verified automatically.
3. Otherwise choose Add a Site and verify with Domain Connect, an XML file in your root directory, a meta tag on your homepage, or a DNS TXT record.
4. Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps and set up IndexNow (see below).
5. Wait. Bing says traffic data for a newly verified site can take up to 48 hours. A third-party walkthrough says to allow about 24 hours for AI Performance data.
6. Open AI Performance. Microsoft’s instruction is simply to “navigate to AI Performance”. The report opens on Citations & Pages; a Topics Portfolio tab appears beside it when your site has enough data.

Import limits: up to 100 sites at once and 1,000 per Bing account. Bing re-checks ownership by syncing with Search Console, so if you later revoke that access you must verify another way. If you choose the meta-tag method, the tag is named msvalidate.01; DNS and file verification leave nothing in your HTML.

What each number means

Added 16 June 2026: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare

• Intents: grounding queries are classified into categories “such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local, and more”.
• Topics: related grounding queries are grouped into themes. Microsoft’s example maps “solar panels”, “solar energy efficiency” and “residential solar installation” to a Solar Energy topic.
• Citation Share: your share of all the citations shown for a grounding query, across all sites.
• Compare: overlays an earlier period, such as the previous 30 days, on the current view.

Importantly, Citation Share is designed as an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content.

Added 13 October 2026: Topics Portfolio (beta)

Topics Portfolio groups the grounding queries where your site appears into broader themes and adds context about the whole topic. Each topic row has four columns:

Below the table, Top Opportunity Queries lists queries “where other sites appear and yours does not”, with citation volumes shown as ranges. Click a topic and you get two tables, Your Grounding Queries and Opportunity Queries. You can choose a one-, two- or three-month window. Microsoft’s post calls the tab both “Topics Portfolio” and “Topics”, so expect either label.

Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.

Two limits matter for small sites. Topics without enough activity are not shown, “so smaller sites may see a shorter list or may not even see this feature.” And other companies’ branded queries can appear as “opportunities” you could never win.

How to read grounding queries

A grounding query is not what the user typed. It is the phrase the AI system used to fetch sources while building an answer; Microsoft defines grounding as “the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response.” One question can produce several grounding queries, and the list is sampled. It is still the closest thing available to an AI system’s own search log for your site.

1. Query to page. Microsoft describes the report as running “from the grounding queries where it appears to the pages cited for each query.” A third-party walkthrough describes clicking a grounding query to list the pages cited for it. If the cited page is not the one you would choose, you have a finding.
2. Page to queries. The same walkthrough says clicking a URL shows all its grounding queries for the period. Read them for your most-cited pages: they show what the AI system thinks each page is about, which is not always what you intended.
3. Themes, not keywords. Sort by Topic or Intent to see where citations cluster, then use Citation Share to see whether you are one source among many or the main one.

Grounding queries cannot tell you the exact question a person asked, whether they read your citation, or whether they clicked. They are evidence of what the retrieval system looked for, nothing more.

What the report does not tell you

• Clicks or traffic. There are none. Use your analytics and server logs for visits.
• Which surface or partner. Copilot, Bing’s summaries and unnamed partners are combined; a third-party walkthrough found no option to filter by channel.
• Placement. A citation at the bottom of a long answer counts the same as the first source.
• Completeness. Grounding queries are sampled, Topics and Intents are AI-classified, and Topics Portfolio figures are approximate.
• Competitors. Citation Share does not name other domains.
• Pages you have opted out. In the launch post Bing says it “respects all content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported control mechanisms.” Its 2023 guidance keeps pages tagged noarchive out of its chat answers entirely, and limits nocache pages to URL, title and snippet. Do not expect citations for noarchive pages.

A worked example (hypothetical): grounding query, cited page, fix

Imagine a regional heating installer with a three-year-old blog. In AI Performance, on Citations & Pages, the owner sets the last three months and sorts grounding queries by citations:

Step 1: read the query-to-page mapping. Both cost queries cite a 2023 blog post. The service page built to answer them, /heat-pumps/costs/, appears nowhere.

Step 2: diagnose with checks you can verify. Fetch both pages as raw HTML. Suppose the 2023 post has a plain comparison table with dated figures, while the service page is sales copy whose price table is injected by a script that crawlers without JavaScript never see, and its canonical tag, copied from a template, points to the homepage. The AI system is citing the only page that states the facts, and the newer page tells search engines to credit another URL. Both problems are covered in what crawlers get without JavaScript and canonical and Open Graph consistency.

Step 3: fix the page you want cited. Put the figures in server-rendered HTML with a visible “last updated” date and sources, make the canonical point to the page itself, and link to it from the 2023 post, or merge the two and 301-redirect the old URL. Then send both URLs to IndexNow; its FAQ says to submit redirected URLs too.

Step 4: measure honestly. After 30 days, use Compare against the previous 30. Check whether the cited page for those queries has switched and whether Citation Share moved. Then check Topic Size in Topics Portfolio. Heating questions rise every autumn, and Microsoft itself lists seasonality among the reasons citation activity changes. If your citations rose while the whole topic grew, that is not proof the fix worked.

IndexNow: tell Bing, and others, that a page changed

IndexNow is an open protocol for notifying search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for a recrawl. Microsoft ties it directly to AI answers:

By enabling faster discovery of content changes, IndexNow helps ensure that AI systems reference the most current version of a page when generating answers.

One submission reaches every participant. The IndexNow FAQ lists endpoints for the global api.indexnow.org, Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, and says your submission “will be shared across all IndexNow-enabled search engines”. Google is not on that list as of 13 October 2026, so IndexNow does nothing for Search Console.

Set it up

1. Check whether your platform already does it. The FAQ says CMS, hosting and SEO-plugin integrations need no key file, and “Cloudflare offers native IndexNow integration.” Bing’s guide names Shopify, Wix and Duda.
2. Otherwise create a key: 8 to 128 characters, using only a–z, A–Z, 0–9 and dashes.
3. Host it as a UTF-8 text file named after the key, such as your-key.txt, at the root of your site, containing only the key. A key file in a subfolder only covers URLs under that folder, and the docs strongly recommend the root.
4. Submit changed URLs: one at a time with a GET request, or up to 10,000 in one JSON POST.

# One URL (the url value must be URL-encoded)
curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fheat-pumps%2Fcosts%2F&key=YOUR_KEY"

# Up to 10,000 URLs in one request
curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{"host":"www.example.com","key":"YOUR_KEY","keyLocation":"https://www.example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt","urlList":["https://www.example.com/heat-pumps/costs/","https://www.example.com/blog/heat-pumps-2023/"]}'

What the responses mean, and what we saw

On 13 October 2026 we sent a few deliberately invalid requests to api.indexnow.org, using the reserved example.com domain and made-up keys, to compare real responses with the documented ones. Each error came back with a JSON body explaining it.

Two lessons. A badly formed key fails with 422, not 403, so read the JSON body, not just the status code. And a 200 or 202 is a receipt, not a promise: the FAQ says “Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing” and “Every URL submitted through IndexNow counts toward your site's crawl quota.” Submit real changes only, and keep your sitemap; the two work together.

Microsoft’s content advice, checked against the evidence

Bing’s launch post pairs the report with five content tips: depth and expertise, structure and clarity, evidence for claims, freshness, and consistency across text, images and video. Most fit the evidence, freshness especially. One needs a caveat:

Clear headings, tables, and FAQ sections help surface key information and make content easier for AI systems to reference accurately.

Clear headings are basic structure that Google asks for too. FAQ sections as a citation lever are another matter: we know of no controlled test showing they raise citations, the largest correlational dataset found FAQ blocks slightly negative for ChatGPT citations, and Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. The evidence is in what JSON-LD and FAQ markup actually do for AI citations. This report lets you test it on your own site.

Reporting it to clients

For agencies this is the most defensible AI number in a client report, because it comes from the platform rather than from prompt screenshots. Report it carefully:

• Show citations, cited pages and the top grounding-query themes, with the date range and the word “preview”.
• Never add Bing citations to Google impressions. They measure different things.
• Never call it ChatGPT visibility. Microsoft does not name its partners.
• Pair every change you made with a Compare view, and show Topic Size next to the client’s citations so seasonality is visible.
• Keep monthly exports: preview labels and approximate figures may change.

A finding only helps a client when the evidence and the fix come with it; we set out that format in what a usable audit finding contains, and the full measurement plan across Google, Bing and analytics is in how to measure AI visibility. If you want the on-site checks as a first deliverable, there is a white-label audit for agencies.

Checklist

• Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools (import from Search Console), submit the sitemap, switch on IndexNow.
• After a day or two, open AI Performance and export Citations & Pages.
• For your top 20 grounding queries, note the cited page and whether it is the one you would choose.
• Fix mismatches on the page itself: facts in the HTML, a self-referencing canonical, a visible date.
• Notify IndexNow, wait 30 days, then check Compare and Topic Size before claiming a win.

The report shows where you are cited. It cannot show whether AI crawlers can reach and read the pages you want cited, which is the half you control directly. Run a free audit to check that half.