GEO / AI search

Bing AI Performance

Q: How long has Bing AI Performance been available?

The report was released as a public preview on 10 February 2026. The major feature update with intents, topics, citation share and compare followed on 16 June 2026. Public preview means Microsoft may still change the report or add metrics — but access is open to all verified Bing Webmaster Tools properties.

Q: What is the difference between a citation and a grounding query?

A citation is an actual reference to your URL in a Copilot answer. A grounding query is the internal search query Copilot generates in order to find relevant sources. For example: a user asks ”Which is better for my SME: a GmbH or a UG?”. Copilot internally generates the grounding queries ”gmbh vorteile kmu”, ”ug haftungsbeschränkung stammkapital” and ”gmbh vs ug vergleich”. Your site may then be cited for the third grounding query — even though the user's question was worded differently.

Q: Can I use Bing AI Performance without Rankmio?

Yes — the report is part of the free Bing Webmaster Tools and can be viewed there directly. Rankmio adds three things missing from the BWT interface: (1) Historical consolidation — combining several monthly exports in a single dashboard. (2) Cross-referencing with other Rankmio metrics (visibility index, chat agent, Content Studio). (3) German interface — BWT is bilingual, but parts of the AI report area still carry English labels.

Also known as: AI Performance Report, Bing Copilot Citations, Grounding Queries Report

Bing AI Performance is a report within Bing Webmaster Tools, launched as a public preview on 10 February 2026. It shows first-party data on AI citations from Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI summaries: how often a URL was cited as a source, which grounding queries Copilot generated internally in order to find the page and — since the June 2026 update — search intents, topic clusters and a compare feature for different time periods. This makes Microsoft the first search platform to offer first-party AI citation reporting. Google Search Console, Yandex, DuckDuckGo and others currently have no comparable feature.

What are grounding queries?

Grounding queries are the internal search queries Copilot generates in order to answer a user's question. A user asks: ”How do I set up a limited company?”. Copilot breaks this down internally into several search queries (for example ”gmbh gründung schritte”, ”notar gmbh kosten”, ”handelsregister anmeldung”) and crawls the appropriate sources for each one. A site cited in a grounding query is therefore indirectly part of the AI answer — even if the user phrased the original question in a completely different way. This grounding query view exists only in Bing AI Performance; no other tool shows it.

Metrics and report formats

Total citations — all citations within the period.
Cited pages — the number of unique URLs cited at least once.
Grounding queries — the internal Copilot queries with the number of hits per query.
Search intent (since 06/2026) — classification of user intent: informational, commercial, navigational, transactional.
Topics (since 06/2026) — topic clusters spanning several queries.
Citation share (since 06/2026) — your share of the total citation volume for a query.

The report exports as CSV in two formats: ”AI Performance Overview” (a time series with date, citations and cited pages) and ”Cited Queries” (detail rows with URL, query, citations, intent and topic).

Why this matters strategically for GEO

Conventional citation trackers (including Rankmio itself) work on a prompt basis: they send defined test questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others and check whether the domain appears in the answer — a simulation. Bing AI Performance, by contrast, delivers real user queries: the figures come from actual Copilot sessions with real people. That is the difference between a survey (”would you have cited my content?”) and a real measurement (”this content was cited 187 times”). The two approaches complement each other: prompt tests reveal potential visibility gaps, while first-party reports show the actual effect.

No API — CSV import is mandatory

Microsoft has so far not made the AI Performance report available via an API. The classic Bing Webmaster API does not cover this area either. For tool providers, the only current option is the CSV export from the user interface. Rankmio has therefore built a tolerant CSV importer that recognises both report formats, accepts German and English headers including umlaut normalisation, and automatically detects the separator (comma, semicolon, tab). As soon as Microsoft provides an API, auto-sync will be added — the CSV upload will remain as a fallback.

Example from practice

Example: A Rankmio customer imports the Bing AI Performance CSV export every month. After three months, the Rankmio dashboard shows 892 Copilot citations across 63 URLs, spread over 340 unique grounding queries. The top query is ”content studio vs neuroflash” with 47 citations, all pointing to the insights article of the same name. The customer recognises that their strategic comparison positioning is working. Conversely, the intent distribution shows that 68% of citations come from ”informational” queries but only 8% from ”commercial” — a reason to build a buying-advice page with a clear commercial intent.

Frequently asked questions

How long has Bing AI Performance been available?

The report was released as a public preview on 10 February 2026. The major feature update with intents, topics, citation share and compare followed on 16 June 2026. Public preview means Microsoft may still change the report or add metrics — but access is open to all verified Bing Webmaster Tools properties.

Which AI systems are included?

Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI-generated summaries and selected partner AI integrations. Not included: ChatGPT (although it uses Bing web search, this is separate data), Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity. Anyone wanting the full multi-engine view combines Bing AI Performance with the Rankmio citation tracker, which covers the other 5 engines.

What is the difference between a citation and a grounding query?

A citation is an actual reference to your URL in a Copilot answer. A grounding query is the internal search query Copilot generates in order to find relevant sources. For example: a user asks ”Which is better for my SME: a GmbH or a UG?”. Copilot internally generates the grounding queries ”gmbh vorteile kmu”, ”ug haftungsbeschränkung stammkapital” and ”gmbh vs ug vergleich”. Your site may then be cited for the third grounding query — even though the user's question was worded differently.

Can I use Bing AI Performance without Rankmio?

Yes — the report is part of the free Bing Webmaster Tools and can be viewed there directly. Rankmio adds three things missing from the BWT interface: (1) Historical consolidation — combining several monthly exports in a single dashboard. (2) Cross-referencing with other Rankmio metrics (visibility index, chat agent, Content Studio). (3) German interface — BWT is bilingual, but parts of the AI report area still carry English labels.

How reliable is the data?

First-party raw data from Microsoft, but with public preview status. That means the figures are unfiltered and come directly from the Copilot backend, but Microsoft may still change metric definitions. Current experience (Q3 2026): volume is low for small German sites — often only 5-50 citations per month. The trend over 3 or more months is more meaningful than absolute individual values.

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Last updated: 2026-07-02 · Browse all glossary entries