Microsoft Copilot SEO is the work of getting your pages found, indexed and cited by Bing and by the AI answers built on it, chiefly Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s generative summaries. Microsoft gives site owners two free tools for this: Bing Webmaster Tools (with a citation report) and IndexNow, a protocol that tells search engines the moment a page changes.
What are Bing Webmaster Tools, Copilot and IndexNow?
- Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s version of Search Console. You verify your site, submit sitemaps, inspect URLs and read performance data.
- Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant. It writes answers with source links, and Bing Webmaster Tools reports when your content is cited in them.
- IndexNow is an open protocol: you send a short request listing changed URLs, and participating engines learn about them without waiting for a crawl. Per the IndexNow FAQ, the participants are Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, and a submission to one endpoint is shared with the others. Each engine still decides on its own whether to index the page. Google is not on that list, so Google still relies on its crawl and your XML sitemap.
Why does it matter for AI search?
An AI answer can only cite pages the engine has indexed, and stale pages get cited with stale facts. Bing Webmaster Tools reports citations in Copilot and Bing summaries, and a page that Bing has not indexed or has indexed in an old version has no chance of being cited correctly. The setup is free and takes an afternoon.
What does the AI Performance report show?
Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview in February 2026. It reports how your content is cited in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Total citations | How many times your content is shown as a source in a chosen period. It does not show position inside the answer. |
| Average cited pages | Unique pages from your site cited per day. It is not a ranking or authority score. |
| Grounding queries | The phrases the AI used to retrieve your content. Microsoft says this data is a sample. |
| Page-level activity | Citation counts per URL. |
| Visibility trends | A timeline of citations. |
Microsoft calls the report an early step toward GEO tooling. For the bigger picture, see generative engine optimization.
How do you set up Bing, Copilot visibility and IndexNow, step by step?
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Sign in at bing.com/webmasters. If your site is already verified in Google Search Console, Bing offers to import it. Otherwise add the site and verify by DNS, meta tag or file.
- Submit your sitemap and list it in robots.txt (
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml). - Create an IndexNow API key. The API key is 8 to 128 characters (letters, digits and dashes). Save it as a UTF-8 text file in your site root, such as
https://example.com/<key>.txt, with the API key as the file’s only content. - Send changes automatically. For one URL, request
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=<encoded URL>&key=<key>. For many, POST JSON withhost,keyandurlList(up to 10,000 URLs per request). Plugins for WordPress and CDN integrations (Cloudflare, among others) do this on publish, update and delete. Prefer a plugin over hand-made scripts. - Read the response codes. 200 means the engine received the URL, 202 means API key validation is pending, 403 means the API key is invalid, 422 means the URLs do not match the host, and 429 means you are sending too many requests. Note that 200 does not mean indexed.
- Check Copilot’s view. Open the AI Performance report and note your top cited pages and grounding queries. Those queries show the questions Microsoft’s AI already links to you. Expand those pages first.
- Keep content current. Update dates and facts on pages that are cited, then push them with IndexNow. A fresh page is easier to cite correctly.
- Use local and map listings. Copilot and Bing also draw on map data, so see Apple and Bing Maps for business listings.
How do you measure the result?
Watch four numbers in Bing Webmaster Tools: indexed pages (URL inspection and the site explorer), total citations, average cited pages, and the grounding-query list. Compare the month before and after IndexNow. In Google Analytics filter organic traffic by source bing and check the referral report for Copilot visits.
Remember that Bing data is small next to Google for most sites. Treat it as a bonus and as an early look at AI citation behaviour, not as your main traffic source.
What mistakes should you avoid?
- Submitting URLs you do not want indexed. IndexNow is for pages that return 200 and are canonical.
- Spamming IndexNow with unchanged URLs. Send changes only, or you will hit 429 responses.
- Reading 200 as success. It means received, not indexed.
- Leaving Bing unverified and then having no citation data at all.
- Blocking bingbot in robots.txt or at the CDN by accident.
- Treating the AI Performance numbers as rankings. Microsoft says they are not.
Where can you learn more?
Read Microsoft’s AI Performance announcement and the IndexNow documentation. The free digital marketing module of the Fe/male Switch startup school covers the SEO base. Next steps: set up AI visibility tracking and compare Copilot with ChatGPT search.