Bing has a free AI citation report and almost no one is using it

What the AI Performance report actually shows

If you sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools today, you'll find a tab called AI Performance sitting in the left sidebar. Bing Webmaster Tools is the free Microsoft dashboard where website owners verify their site and see search reports. The AI Performance tab has been live since February 2026. Microsoft launched it as an early access version, but the data's been stable enough to act on for three months now. Almost no service business has claimed it.

The tab is a free dashboard. A dashboard is a single page that lists the basic numbers about your website. This one lists five:

• Total citations. The count of times an AI answer pointed to your website as a source in the last 30 days.
• Average cited pages per query. How many of your pages got pulled into a single answer at the same time.
• Grounding queries. The count of customer questions that produced at least one citation to your site. In plain terms, the count of questions where you showed up.
• Page-level activity. Which of your pages got cited and how often each one was used.
• Trend over time. How those counts have moved week by week, so you can tell if you are gaining or losing ground.

That is the report. It is the only free AI citation report a service business can pull from a major search platform itself right now, and it has been live since February 2026.

You can read about the launch on the official Bing Webmaster blog post from February 19, 2026. Search Engine Land covered the launch on the same day and confirmed the metrics list.

Why this matters for a small business

A service business owner who's never logged into Bing Webmaster Tools is, today, completely blind to AI citation. She asks ChatGPT for a dentist in her area and reads three names back. None of them are her practice, and there's no way for her to check whether the same thing happens for a hundred other patient questions she's also missing.

The AI Performance report shows the exact customer questions that produced an AI citation to her website in the last 30 days. The owner verifies her site (a one-time setup where she proves the site is hers by uploading a small file or adding a Domain Name System record), then opens the AI Performance tab and reads through the list of grounding queries. Each row is a real question someone typed, with a real count of how many times her site was cited as a source. Suddenly the guessing is over for that batch of questions.

The report covers Microsoft Copilot citations and Bing AI summary citations directly. It does not currently include ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews. Even with that limit, this is the first picture a small business has ever had of its AI citation activity from the platform itself, for free.

ChatGPT runs many of its live web searches through the Bing index. The Bing index is the list of websites Bing has crawled and ranked. Analyst writeups by OtterlyAI and ArcIntermedia both note that the pages Microsoft Copilot cites tend to be the same pages ChatGPT cites on the same live web questions, because both pull from that one shared index. So a citation list from the Bing report doubles as a useful read on ChatGPT visibility for the same questions. It is a proxy, meaning a number that stands in for the real one when the real one is not available, and it is the best proxy currently available.

How to actually get the report this weekend

Setup is a one-time job. Here is the short version.

1. Go to bing.com/webmasters and sign in with a free Microsoft account. If you already have a Microsoft email or Hotmail address, that works.
2. Add your website (Bing calls this adding a site to your account).
3. Verify the site, as described above. The Domain Name System (DNS) record step is just a setting at your domain registrar like GoDaddy or Namecheap, and most platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify have a guided helper that does this in two clicks.
4. Wait a few days for the data to start coming in. Bing crawls your site first, then begins counting.
5. Open the AI Performance tab in the left sidebar. Read the list of grounding queries.

That's it. Ten minutes of work the first time. After that, a monthly check takes five minutes.

What to do with the first read of the report depends on what you find. In the audits I run, a site with hundreds of grounding queries is getting cited often by Copilot, and the work from there is to figure out which of your pages get used the most and double down on that style of answer. For most service businesses, though, the first count will be small or zero, which means Copilot is mostly skipping the site on customer questions, and ChatGPT is likely doing the same on the overlapping queries. The fix is to publish clearer answers to the questions your customers actually ask: prices in plain text, hours in plain text, and a dedicated page for each specific service or condition. The patterns that move the count are the same ones I have been writing about for months.

What the report does not tell you

Two real limits worth calling out before you act on the data.

First, the report only tracks Microsoft Copilot citations and Bing AI summary citations directly. ChatGPT activity is a useful read through the shared Bing index. Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews are not in the dashboard at all. You get real numbers for Copilot, a good read on ChatGPT, and nothing for everything else.

Second, you can only see questions where you got cited at least once. Questions where Copilot answered and skipped your site entirely never appear in the data. To see what Copilot or ChatGPT actually says when your site is not in the citation list, you have to ask the question yourself or run a tool that asks the questions on your behalf.

The combination most small businesses end up using is straightforward. Bing's free report handles your monthly baseline for the questions where you are cited. A separate audit tool fills in everything else: the questions where you were skipped, and the engines outside the Bing dashboard. Vyzz runs that second piece across every major engine on the same schedule.

Common questions about the Bing AI Performance report

Does the Bing AI Performance report show ChatGPT citations directly?

No. The report covers Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI summaries. But ChatGPT runs many of its live web searches through the Bing index. So the pages Copilot cites for a query tend to be the pages ChatGPT cites for the same query.

How long does setup actually take?

About ten minutes if your website is on a normal platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify. You add your site, prove it is yours by uploading a small file or changing one setting at your domain registrar, and wait for the data to start filling in. Bing usually shows the first numbers in a few days.

What if my site already shows zero citations?

That is the most common starting point for a small business. The report becomes a baseline. You then publish clearer answers on your services pages, ask for more reviews, and re-check next month to see whether the citation count moves.