The short answer. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report counts how often pages from your site are shown as sources in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and some partner integrations. Unlike Google’s equivalent, it counts citations rather than link impressions, shows which URLs were cited, and gives a sample of the “grounding queries” behind them. It does not tell you rank, placement or what the answer said.
Everything below comes from Microsoft’s announcement of the report, which is the most complete public description of it, quoted where the wording matters. The report was announced as a public preview, so expect changes.
Which surfaces does it cover?
Three, per Microsoft: the report shows “how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations”. The partners are not named. Treat the numbers as Microsoft’s AI surfaces plus an unspecified share of third-party products that use Bing’s index.
What does each metric mean?
| Metric | Microsoft’s definition | What it does not tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Total citations | “The total number of citations that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers during the selected time frame” | “Placement or presentation within a specific answer” |
| Average cited pages | “The average number of unique pages from your site that are displayed as sources in AI-generated answers per day” | Ranking, authority or “the role of any page within an individual answer” |
| Grounding queries | “The key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers” | The full set: “the data shown represents a sample of overall citation activity” |
| Page-level citation activity | “Citation counts for specific URLs from your site” | “Page importance, ranking, or placement” |
| Visibility trends | How “citation activity for your site changes over time across supported AI experiences” | Why it changed |
Two details matter. Only the grounding queries are described as a sample; the citation counts are not. And grounding queries are the phrases the system used to retrieve your page, not necessarily what the person typed.
How is it different from Google’s report?
They measure different events, so they cannot be added together or compared one to one.
Bing AI Performance
- Counts citations shown as sources
- Copilot, Bing AI summaries, some partners
- Cited URLs and a sample of grounding queries
No clicks, no rank, no placement.
Search Console Generative AI performance
- Counts links to your site shown
- AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Pages, countries, devices, dates; no queries
No clicks in this report; clicks are mixed into Web.
The practical consequence: Bing tells you more about why a page was used (the grounding queries) and Google tells you more about where (country and device). Use both, and keep them in separate columns of your report. Our guide to Google’s report covers the other half.
How do you turn it into decisions?
Microsoft’s own suggestions are to “validate which pages are already being used as references in AI answers”, “identify content that appears frequently across AI answers” and “spot opportunities to improve clarity, structure, or completeness on pages that are indexed but less frequently cited”. In practice that becomes three monthly checks.
- Which pages carry the citations? Sort page-level citation activity. If one or two pages hold almost all citations, they are your evidence pages for this surface; protect them when you redesign or migrate.
- What are the grounding queries asking? Read the sample as a list of questions your content is answering. Phrases that do not match the page’s intent show where a page is being used for something it does not cover well, which is a brief for a new page.
- Which indexed pages are never cited? Compare the cited URLs with the pages you expected to be used. An important page with no citations is the first candidate for an answer-first rewrite with sources.
Microsoft also recommends notifying Bing of content changes with IndexNow and, for local businesses, keeping Bing Places details current. Bing states that it “respects all content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported control mechanisms”, so a page Bingbot cannot crawl will not appear here.
What we saw on our own properties
The report has been the most informative AI source for the sites in our case studies, and it varies more than Google’s.
- On castingforgingsource.com, citations rose every month from 50 in April to 325 in September, 1,033 in all over 121 days, the highest of the eight properties.
- On bamboopaper.in, 531 of 752 citations fell in September, with a single-day peak of 196 across four pages. One busy day can account for much of a month.
- On shopifywebdeveloper.co.uk, citations fell from 108 in July to 56 in September.
- On singlecrystaldiamondring.com, citations never exceeded nine in a day and always came from a single page.
None of these patterns could be explained from the report alone, and each case study says so.
What we don’t claim
- We do not claim a citation count is a measure of quality or rank. Microsoft says explicitly that it is not.
- We do not claim the report covers every AI assistant. It covers Microsoft’s surfaces and unnamed partners; ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are measured separately, by sampling.
- We do not claim the definitions are final. The report was launched as a public preview; re-read Microsoft’s documentation before relying on a metric.