Free AI Citation Report — Bing Copilot

Why this is a Copilot report, not an “AI search” report

Every engine is asked the same question — which of my pages did you cite? — and only one of them answers. Microsoft publishes per-page citation counts in Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report, covering “Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations” (blogs.bing.com, 10 February 2026, read 23 September 2026). Google does not. Its documentation says sites appearing in AI features “are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console… reported on in the Performance report, within the ‘Web’ search type” (developers.google.com, last updated 10 December 2025, read 23 September 2026). There is no AI search type and no Generative AI report to export — AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions cannot be separated from ordinary Google impressions by anyone. As of September 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish nothing equivalent either.

So read this report for what it is: a real measurement of one engine, not a proxy for all of them. If Copilot cites you it is genuine evidence that your pages are retrievable and quotable, and that generally travels — but a strong Copilot report is not proof of AI Overviews visibility, and a weak one is not proof of its absence.

Your two Bing files will disagree — here is why

Bing exports citations per page in one file and citations per day in another, and the two totals do not match. In our own export they came to 550 and 554 for the same period. Nothing is broken: Microsoft says “The data shown represents a sample of overall citation activity”, and the two reports are sampled independently. That is why this tool prints each total next to the file it came from and never shows a single headline number. A tool that hands you one confident total has silently chosen one file and hidden the other.

The practical consequence: treat these numbers as a trend and a ranking, not an accounting. Which pages lead, and whether the line is rising, is reliable. The exact count is not, and month-on-month comparisons to the nearest citation are not worth making.

Grounding queries: useful, sampled, and impossible to join to a page

Grounding queries are “the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers”. They are the closest thing to seeing the question behind a citation — but the export has no page column, so the query and the page can never be joined. In our export, two queries were listed covering 122 citations against 554 in the daily file: about a fifth of the period, with the other four fifths not broken out by query at all. Any view that implies otherwise is guessing.

Citation share is not your share of your own citations. Microsoft defines it as “the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query” (blogs.bing.com, 16 June 2026, read 23 September 2026). Every query has a different denominator, so adding these percentages together produces a number that means nothing. This tool shows each share against its own query and never totals them.

What to do with the pages that are winning

The useful move is rarely “make more of the same”. Look at why the cited pages are citable: they usually answer a specific question in plain text, early, without needing JavaScript to appear. Then check that your other important pages meet the same bar — our Bot-Eye View shows what a raw-HTML crawler receives, the Answer Extractability Checker scores how liftable an answer is, and the AI Crawler Log Analyzer tells you whether the crawlers behind these answers are reaching you at all. Citation data tells you what worked; those tell you why, and which pages are missing the prerequisites.

If the report is empty

A zero here is a reason to check the source before it is a reason to worry. AI Performance is a newer Bing Webmaster Tools report: confirm it is enabled and showing data for your site, and widen the date range before exporting again — a short window on a site with modest Bing traffic can legitimately contain no citations. Only once the report itself is confirmed to be working is an empty export telling you something about your pages.