Bing reports how often AI answers cite your pages

Bing Webmaster Tools now answers the question paid tools used to guess at: how often does an AI answer cite your pages. The AI Performance report, in public preview since 10 February 2026, shows citations across Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI-generated answers and, in Microsoft’s words, “select partner integrations.”

What it measures#

Total Citations. How often your content was “displayed as sources in AI-generated answers” in the selected period. Microsoft is explicit this says nothing about placement: cited first or cited last count the same.

Average Cited Pages. The mean number of unique pages from your site cited per day, a breadth measure. It tells you whether a whole section gets used as source material or one page carries everything.

Grounding queries. The phrases the system used when it retrieved content that ended up referenced, not the question the user actually typed. Microsoft calls it a sample, not a complete list.

The AI Performance dashboard, from Microsoft’s own announcement. The domain shown is Microsoft’s placeholder example, not a real site’s data. Source: Bing Webmaster Blog.

Robots.txt still applies. Microsoft says the underlying retrieval “respects robots.txt and other supported control mechanisms,” so a page blocked from Bing’s crawlers cannot show up in this report, however often an answer would otherwise have used it. Low numbers are worth checking against your robots.txt before you read anything else into them.

How to use it without overreading it#

Compare against your own baseline. Citations against your own impressions, not a competitor’s estimate: the absolute count depends on how much AI traffic Bing serves in your market, which you do not control.

Read queries as retrieval language, not keyword research. If the phrasing that pulls your page is consistently narrower than the topic you thought you covered, that is a content gap worth acting on in AI search.

Do not forecast traffic from it. Microsoft’s own framing avoids ranking language throughout, and nobody outside the engines can yet map a citation count onto sessions.

Why we care#

A page can be the source an AI answer is built from and get zero clicks, a state invisible to every traffic report you already run. This is the first free, first-party number that describes it, even though it only covers Microsoft’s surfaces: Google still exposes AI feature performance through Search Console impressions rather than a citation metric, and the two numbers do not add together.