How to Get Your Business Recommended by Microsoft Copilot (It Runs on Bing)

To get your business recommended by Microsoft Copilot, get your pages crawled and indexed by Bing, because Copilot grounds its answers on Bing’s index; make sure you haven’t set the NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE tags that limit Copilot’s use of a page; verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and use its AI Performance report to see which pages Copilot cites; and claim Bing Places if you serve customers locally. Then do the same off-site work as for any assistant: be mentioned on the pages that rank in Bing for your category.

How Copilot finds and cites pages

Copilot searches Bing when a question needs current information and writes an answer with inline citations. When Microsoft launched Copilot Search in Bing in April 2025, it emphasised citations: sources shown prominently, passages linked inline, and every link used to build the answer one click away. Bing doesn’t document a separate Copilot crawler; bingbot builds the index Copilot draws on, and it verifies by IP, which Microsoft publishes.

Microsoft’s 2026 Bing guidelines added generative engine optimization explicitly, and also say that following it doesn’t guarantee citations (as Search Engine Journal reported). Treat this guide the same way: it makes you eligible and easy to cite, not certain to be.

Step 1: check the two tags that decide Copilot use

Bing published these controls in September 2023, for what was then Bing Chat, and they remain the documented way to limit Copilot’s use of your content:

Search your page source for “noarchive” and “nocache” in robots meta tags and X-Robots-Tag headers. Some CMS plugins and CDNs add noarchive by default; if you want Copilot to cite you, remove it.

Step 2: make sure Bing can crawl and index you

1. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. You can import a verified Google Search Console property in a couple of clicks.
2. Submit your sitemap there, and check the URL Inspection tool for your most important pages.
3. Check robots.txt doesn’t block bingbot, and that your firewall lets it through. A bot rule that challenges unknown traffic can turn it away.
4. Set up IndexNow so Bing hears about new and changed pages at once. Many CMSs and CDNs, including Cloudflare, have it built in. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Amazon take part; Google doesn’t.

Our [free audit](/) checks robots.txt and edge access for bingbot alongside the AI crawlers.

Step 3: read the AI Performance report

This is the part no other assistant offers. Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has shown how often your pages are cited “across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations”, with total citations, the pages cited, and a sample of the grounding queries behind them. There are no clicks, and Microsoft calls it an early step. It’s still the closest thing to a ranking report for an AI assistant, and it’s free.

Use it to answer two questions: which of your pages Copilot already trusts (protect and update them), and which grounding queries you’re cited for that you didn’t expect (write better pages for them). The AI Performance report guide explains every column.

Step 4: local businesses, claim Bing Places

Bing Places listings appear “in Bing search results and Bing Maps”, and Microsoft listed “deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot” among its plans when it relaunched Bing Places in October 2025. Bing Places now lives at bing.com/forbusiness and can import your listings from Google. Import, then check every field: categories, hours, phone and the one-sentence description should match your Google Business Profile word for word.

Step 5: give Copilot something to quote

• Answer the question in the first lines of the page, in plain HTML text.
• Use specifics: prices, places, dates, numbers, named methods.
• Keep pages current and dated; update facts when they change.
• Get onto the third-party pages Bing ranks for your category: directories, reviews and “best of” lists (how to get on them).

Measure it

AI Performance citations are the primary measure. Add Copilot referrals in your analytics (GA4’s AI Assistant channel groups them with other assistants; GA4 guide) and a monthly check of your customers’ questions in Copilot. For the other engines, see Gemini, Perplexity and Claude; our dashboard can import your Bing Webmaster data next to your audits.