# What Is Microsoft Copilot and How Does It Cite Stores?

> What Microsoft Copilot is: the assistant that replaced Bing Chat, how it uses Bing's index, how its citations are measured and what Copilot Checkout is.

URL: https://clione.ai/glossary/copilot/
Lang: en

Copilot is a brand Microsoft puts on many products: the assistant for the general public, the Microsoft 365 one for work, GitHub Copilot for coding, Copilot Studio for building agents. For a store, the first one counts, along with its version inside the Bing search engine, which answer with information from the web. It matters to a store because **Copilot is another [answer engine](/glossary/answer-engine/) with its own index, its own measurement tool and, since 2026, its own checkout**, and none of that is visible from Google.

## How it works

**From Bing Chat to Copilot.** The AI chat Microsoft added to Bing changed its name on November 15, 2023: Bing Chat, and its business version, were renamed Copilot.[^ms-ignite-2023] The origin explains where it reads from.

**Bing's index.** Microsoft says it plainly: experiences like Microsoft Copilot run on Bing's search index and serve billions of queries a month. And it describes how an answer gets built: assistants like Copilot **break content into smaller, structured pieces**, evaluate them for authority and relevance and assemble them into a single answer, often with several sources at once.[^microsoft-ai-search] For your store, that means every fragment of a [product page](/glossary/product-page/) counts, not just the page as a whole.

**Copilot Search.** On April 4, 2025, Microsoft introduced Copilot Search in Bing, which blends classic and generative search on the same page. According to Microsoft, it **cites its sources prominently** and links the exact sentence or passage of the answer to the source it comes from, and it keeps the usual web results at hand.[^copilot-search]

**Measurement.** Since February 10, 2026, [Bing Webmaster Tools](/glossary/bing-webmaster-tools/) has had a report in public preview, AI Performance, with four data points: the total number of times your pages are cited as a source in AI-generated answers, the average number of distinct pages from your site cited per day, the [grounding](/glossary/grounding/) queries (the phrases the AI used to retrieve the content it ended up citing) and the citations for each URL. It covers Copilot, AI-generated summaries within Bing and some partner integrations.[^bing-ai-performance]

**Buying.** On January 8, 2026, Microsoft introduced Copilot Checkout: the shopper pays inside the conversation, without being redirected to the store's site, and **the store remains the merchant of record for the sale**, owner of the transaction, the customer data and the relationship. It started in the United States, on Copilot.com, with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe. PayPal and Stripe stores apply for it; Shopify stores are enrolled automatically when an opt-out period ends. Microsoft adds that Microsoft [Merchant Center](/glossary/google-merchant-center/) product feeds help inform Copilot's organic results, although they are not required for Copilot Checkout.[^copilot-checkout] It is Microsoft's version of [agentic checkout](/glossary/agentic-checkout/).

## In a store

Microsoft publishes its own recommendations for getting content into [AI search](/glossary/ai-search/) answers, and some of them go straight to the [product page](/glossary/product-page/). Here is how they would look applied to a dishwasher page, in a **fictional example** that starts from the example Microsoft itself gives:

| Part of the page (fictional example) | Before                    | After                                                                          | What Microsoft recommends                                                                                      |
| ------------------------------------ | ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Description                          | Quiet, stylish dishwasher | 42 dB dishwasher designed for kitchens open to the living room                 | Concrete context instead of vague descriptions[^microsoft-ai-search]                                           |
| Buying questions                     | One long paragraph        | Questions and answers: "Will it fit under a 34-inch counter?"                  | Question and answer format and clear headings[^microsoft-ai-search]                                            |
| Comparison with other models         | None                      | A table with noise, consumption and capacity for the three models in the range | Comparison tables[^microsoft-ai-search]                                                                        |
| Page code                            | No markup                 | A [JSON-LD](/glossary/json-ld/) block that identifies the page as a product    | [Schema markup](/glossary/schema-markup/) in JSON-LD, so the AI knows what each thing is[^microsoft-ai-search] |

The first row explains the rest: nobody can cite "quiet," and "42 dB" can be cited, compared and checked. **A piece that makes sense on its own is a piece that can be used**, and that is what a system that breaks content into fragments looks for.


**Being on Google is not being in Copilot, and [Search Console](/glossary/google-search-console/) does not measure it.** Copilot is backed by Bing's index,[^microsoft-ai-search] and Search Console's [generative AI report](/glossary/generative-ai-performance-report/) counts impressions in [AI Overviews](/glossary/ai-overviews/) and in [AI Mode](/glossary/google-ai-mode/), not in Copilot.[^gsc-genai-report] Citations in Copilot are measured in Bing Webmaster Tools.[^bing-ai-performance]


## How to check it

1. **Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and open AI Performance.** See how many times you are cited and which pages.[^bing-ai-performance]
2. **Read the grounding queries.** They are the phrases the AI used to reach your content: they tell you what questions it considers you a source for.[^bing-ai-performance]
3. **Ask Copilot what your shopper would ask** and open the links in the answer to see which sources it cites for each sentence.[^copilot-search] Repeat on another day: one answer is a sample of one.
4. **Go over your product pages with Microsoft's guide**: concrete descriptions, questions and answers, comparison tables and JSON-LD markup.[^microsoft-ai-search]
5. **If you sell on Shopify in the United States, check your status in Copilot Checkout**: enrollment is automatic when the opt-out period ends.[^copilot-checkout]

## Related concept: Gemini

[Gemini](/glossary/gemini/) is the same thing seen from Google: an assistant and, at the same time, the model that writes the search engine's AI answers. The difference that matters to a store is in where they read from and where it is measured. Copilot reads from Bing's index and its citations are counted in Bing Webmaster Tools;[^microsoft-ai-search][^bing-ai-performance] Google's AI features are measured in Search Console, which gives impressions in AI Overviews and in AI Mode.[^gsc-genai-report] **Two search engines, two indexes, two dashboards**: a store that looks at only one sees half.

To go further, the [AI search reading path](/learn/ai-search/) orders the rest of the terms, and the entry on [Bing Webmaster Tools](/glossary/bing-webmaster-tools/) explains how to register your site and what else it measures.