# Bing Webmaster Tools: What It Is and What It Measures for AI

> What Bing Webmaster Tools is, how to set up your store, which reports it has and how AI Performance counts the citations of your pages in Copilot.

URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/bing-webmaster-tools/
Lang: en

Bing Webmaster Tools is, for Bing, what [Search Console](/glossary/google-search-console/) is for Google: the dashboard where a site's owner sees how the search engine treats it. Many stores put it off because Bing has less market share than Google, and that is the miscalculation: according to Microsoft (June 2025), **Bing serves other searches and AI tools**, among them Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT, in addition to [Copilot](/glossary/copilot/).[^bing-start] And since February 2026 it has something Microsoft presented as a first: a count of how many times an AI-generated answer cites your pages.[^bing-ai-performance]

## What it includes

**The setup.** You go to bing.com/webmasters with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account, add the site and prove it is yours with one of five methods: Domain Connect (if your DNS provider supports it), an XML verification file in the root, a meta tag on the home page, a TXT record in the DNS or **direct import from Search Console**, if the site is already verified there.[^bing-start]

**The search reports.** Once verified, the dashboard starts collecting data. Microsoft lists what it brings:[^bing-start]

- **Search performance**: impressions, clicks and average position by page and by keyword, with up to 16 months of data.
- **URL inspection**: the [indexing](/glossary/indexing/) status of a specific URL, whether it can be crawled, its HTTP response code and the blocked resources.
- **Site Explorer**: the site's structure as Bing sees it, with the indexed pages, crawl blocks and error responses.
- **Sitemaps**: submitted and monitored from here; Bing processes them at least once every 24 hours.
- **Site Scan**: a technical audit that looks for broken links, duplicate tags and missing metadata.
- **[`robots.txt`](/glossary/robots-txt/) tester** and crawl control, to decide when [Bingbot](/glossary/bingbot/) visits and which pages should not appear.
- Prioritized recommendations, keyword research, inbound links and a Copilot assistant inside the dashboard.

**The change notices.** Bing Webmaster Tools is integrated with [IndexNow](/glossary/indexnow/), the protocol your site uses to tell Bing and the other participating search engines that a URL has been created, changed or deleted, without waiting for a crawl. Microsoft gives it as an optional but highly recommended setup step, along with submitting the sitemap.[^bing-start]

## AI Performance: citations in AI answers

On February 10, 2026, Microsoft opened a new report in public preview, AI Performance, which shows **how your content appears as a source in Copilot, in Bing's AI-generated summaries and in some partner integrations**.[^bing-ai-performance] It has five views:[^bing-ai-performance]

- **Total citations**: how many times your content was shown as a source in generated answers, without saying where in the answer.
- **Average cited pages**: how many distinct pages on your site show up as a source per day, on average.
- **[Grounding](/glossary/grounding/) queries**: the key phrases the AI used to retrieve the content that ended up cited. It is a sample, not the total.
- **Citations by page**: which URLs are cited most. Bing warns that this reflects frequency, not importance, position or place in the answer.
- **Trend**: how citations change over time.

On June 16, 2026, it added four features, also in preview. **Intents** classifies grounding queries into categories such as informational, commercial, navigational, local or research. **Topics** groups related queries into topical clusters. **Citation Share** gives the percentage of the citations for a grounding query that belong to your site, out of those of all the sites cited for that same query. And **Compare** overlays a previous period on the current one.[^bing-ai-insights] Microsoft is insistent about what they are not: citation share does not show competitors' domains, is not a share of traffic and does not score content quality, and the intent and topic classifications come from models that are still being tuned.[^bing-ai-insights]

One detail worth knowing before touching anything: Bing says it respects the preferences you express in `robots.txt` and in the other control mechanisms it supports.[^bing-ai-performance]

## In a store

Here is how the citations-by-page view might read for a backpack store, with the grounding query you see when you open each URL and the intent Bing assigns it. It is a **fictitious example**: the URLs, the queries and the figures are made up to show how to read the report.

| Cited page (fictitious example)   | Citations in 30 days | Sample grounding query                     | Intent        |
| --------------------------------- | -------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | ------------- |
| /products/urban-backpack-20       | 41                   | waterproof backpack for a 15-inch laptop   | Commercial    |
| /blogs/guide/how-to-choose-liters | 27                   | how many liters do I need for a 3-day trip | Informational |
| /products/travel-backpack-40      | 6                    | carry-on backpack 22x14x9 inches           | Commercial    |
| /pages/shipping                   | 3                    | northpack backpacks delivery time          | Navigational  |


The useful reading is in the differences. The first [product page](/glossary/product-page/) is cited on purchase queries: it is entering the conversation when someone compares. The capacity guide is cited on informational queries, before anyone has decided what to buy, and it is the door to the product pages. The 40-liter product page is cited little for a query that asks for exact dimensions: if its dimensions are not written in text, **the AI has nowhere to get them**. Bing recommends exactly that for pages that are cited less than they should be: clear headings, tables, FAQs and data with its source.[^bing-ai-performance]


**A citation is not a visit.** AI Performance counts the times your content appears as a source in a generated answer, without saying in what position or with what weight,[^bing-ai-performance] and citation share is not a share of traffic.[^bing-ai-insights] The people who then click the link are counted in your analytics: Google Analytics groups the visits that arrive from assistants such as Copilot into its AI Assistant channel.[^ga4-channels] Many citations can bring few visits, and the other way around.


## How to check it

1. **Set up the store.** Go to bing.com/webmasters and, if you already have it in Search Console, import it; if not, verify it with the meta tag, the XML file or a TXT record.[^bing-start]
2. **Submit the sitemap** from the Sitemaps section, or declare it in `robots.txt`. Bing processes it at least once every 24 hours.[^bing-start]
3. **Inspect an important product page** with URL inspection: indexing status, response code and blocked resources.[^bing-start]
4. **Turn on IndexNow** from your platform, if it comes built in, or in the site's code.[^bing-start]
5. **Open AI Performance** and see which pages are cited, with which grounding queries and with what intent; use Compare to see whether a change to your product pages moved the citations.[^bing-ai-performance][^bing-ai-insights]

## Related concept: Search Console

Both tools are free, ask you to verify the site and share the basics: performance, URL inspection and sitemaps.[^bing-start] The difference is in AI, because **each one measures something different**. Search Console gives your site's impressions in Google's [AI Overviews](/glossary/ai-overviews/) and [AI Mode](/glossary/google-ai-mode/), for all sites since August 31, 2026.[^gsc-genai-report] Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations as a source in Copilot and in Bing's summaries.[^bing-ai-performance] An impression says a link to your site was shown; a citation says your page was a source of the answer. Neither sees what the other sees, so a store that wants to know where it appears in [AI search](/glossary/ai-search/) needs both.

To go further, the [measurement and verification reading path](/learn/measurement-and-verification/) orders the rest of the terms, and the entry on [AI citation](/glossary/ai-citation/) explains what counts as a citation in each assistant.