Copilot is built into Microsoft 365, so for buyers at companies that use it, it is the assistant already open at work. When it looks something up, it asks Bing a short question and cites what Bing returns. Microsoft documents both halves, and gives site owners a report on the result.
Microsoft’s documentation for Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat explains it step by step (Microsoft Learn). With web search on, Copilot parses the prompt, picks out the terms where web information would help, and “generates a search query that it sends to the Bing search service”. That query “consists of a few words informed by the user’s prompt”, not the prompt itself. The results come back and are used to compose the answer, and in Copilot Chat the citation section shows the exact queries that were sent to Bing.
Microsoft’s own examples make the pattern clear: a request to summarise a company’s finances and strategy becomes two searches, the company name plus “strategy”, and the company name plus “financials”. A buyer asking Copilot to compare vendors for a project gets an answer built from what Bing returns for a handful of short searches.
| Step | What happens | What decides whether it’s you |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Prompt | A user asks Copilot a question at work or on the web | Nothing yet |
| 2. Query | Copilot writes a few-word search and sends it to Bing | Whether your pages match that short query |
| 3. Results | Bing returns pages from its index | Whether Bing has indexed you and ranks you |
| 4. Answer | Copilot writes from the results and cites sources | Whether your page states the answer clearly enough to use |
In February 2026 Bing added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing Webmaster Blog). It shows how your content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and some partner integrations: total citations, the average number of your pages cited per day, citation counts per URL, and grounding queries, “the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content”. That last one is the closest thing any AI platform offers to a keyword report.
The same post lists what Bing recommends to get cited: keep content fresh with IndexNow; improve structure with “clear headings, tables, and FAQ sections”; support claims with “examples, data, and cited sources”; deepen coverage of related topics; keep text, images and video consistent about the same entities; and, for local businesses, keep Bing Places details current.
Access is rarely the problem: only 87 of 4,762 top sites block Bingbot from their homepage, against 705 that block GPTBot. Indexing and ranking in Bing are where most sites fall short, because few teams look at Bing at all.
Bing’s AI Performance report is the primary source for Copilot citations of your own pages, and it’s free. Mentioned doesn’t query Copilot: it asks Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini on our keys, which shows whether the models themselves name you. The two answer different questions, and tools that read Copilot directly are listed in AI visibility tools compared. For the other assistants, see our guides to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
Yes. Microsoft’s documentation says that with web search on, Copilot generates a short search query from the user’s prompt, sends it to the Bing search service and composes its answer from the results.
Use the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, in public preview since February 2026. It shows citations across Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, per-page counts and the grounding queries the AI used.
Bing recommends keeping content fresh with IndexNow, using clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, supporting claims with examples, data and cited sources, covering related topics in depth, and keeping text, images and video consistent.