Bing AI Performance and Topics Portfolio: how to see when Copilot cites your site

Measuring whether an AI cites your site has always had the same problem: the engines tell you nothing. You had to ask them by hand, many times, and take notes. Bing is the first platform to show, with its own data, how often its AI answers use your pages as a source. It has done so since February 2026 with the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, and since October 13 it adds Topics Portfolio, which groups those citations by topic and shows you the queries where other sites get cited and yours doesn't.

This guide explains what each report measures, how to turn it on, how to read it to decide what to write and — just as important — what it doesn't tell you. The explanation comes from Bing's official documentation, and further down we show how it looks with loco22.com's real data.

Key takeaways

• +AI Performance shows your site's citations in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner integrations. It's free and has been in public preview since February 10, 2026.
• +It measures how often you're cited, how many distinct pages, and which grounding queries the AI used to find them. It doesn't measure clicks, traffic or where in the answer you appeared.
• +Topics Portfolio (beta since October 13, 2026) groups those queries by topic and lists opportunity queries: where other sites get cited and yours doesn't.
• +It only shows up if Bing has enough data on your site, everything comes in ranges, and it arrives about two months late: Bing asks you to read it as planning signals, not an exact ledger.
• +It doesn't replace Search Console or your own measurement: it covers Copilot and Bing. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity you still need a sample of repeated questions.

What AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools is

AI Performance is a report in Bing Webmaster Tools, Microsoft's free console for site owners and the equivalent of Google Search Console. It shows how your content appears as a source in answers generated by Microsoft Copilot, by Bing's AI summaries and by some partner integrations Bing doesn't detail. These are its metrics:

The most valuable piece is the grounding queries. They aren't the questions the user typed, but the searches the AI ran behind the scenes to build the answer. They tell you which words the system finds you with, which aren't always the ones you'd use.

How to turn it on in five steps

• +Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft, Google or Facebook account.
• +Add your site. If it's already in Google Search Console, you can import it from there and skip verification; otherwise, verify it with a file, a meta tag or a DNS record.
• +Submit your sitemap so Bing knows all your pages. If your site uses IndexNow, Bing learns about changes as they happen.
• +Check that your robots.txt doesn't block Bingbot: Bing respects what you put there, and no crawling means no citations.
• +Open the AI Performance report. Give it a few days to gather data, especially if the site is new to the console.

What Topics Portfolio adds

Topics Portfolio is a new tab inside AI Performance, next to Citations & Pages. It takes the grounding queries where your site appears, groups them into topics and shows you how much activity and how much competition each one has:

Opening a topic shows three indicators — topic size, your citations in it and the query count — and two lists: the queries where you're already cited and the opportunity queries within that same topic. You can look at one, two or three closed months, with a delay: on October 19, 2026, the most recent window in our dashboard was August. Whatever you change on your site today won't show up there for about two months.

Bing's caveats, in plain words

• +It only shows up if there's enough data on your site. A small site may see few topics or no tab at all, and a missing topic doesn't mean you have no citations there.
• +There are no exact numbers: topic size, sites cited, queries and opportunity volume are all shown as ranges (for example, “10K-50K”). In Bing's words: treat them as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.
• +Topics and opportunities are personalized to your site's context: another site in the same field may see a different list.
• +Topic names are AI-generated and can be misclassified.
• +Opportunities can include queries carrying a competitor's brand. Those aren't real opportunities: you won't win a search for someone else's name.

A real case: loco22's portfolio

To show how it reads, this is loco22.com's Topics Portfolio with the three-month window (June to August 2026). Bing gave us two topics, with fairly generic names: “Marketing & Advertising” and “Performance & Optimization”. Careful with the figures in the table: they're citations to every site in the topic, not ours.

The opportunity queries teach the most, as long as you separate the ones you can win from the ones you can't. This is how we read them:

Two things stand out. The opportunities that fit us all revolve around the same thing: how to measure a brand's visibility in AI, and with which tools. And several are in Spanish with English jargon (“prompts”, “AEO”): people search in their own language but with the field's terms, and it pays to write the same way. Since the data runs through August, what we published in October about measurement doesn't show up yet: it's what to check again in December, with the same window.

How to use this data to decide what to write

Bing recommends starting with the topics where you're already cited and then working through the opportunities. In practice, we do it in this order:

• +See which pages get cited most and for which queries. If a page is cited for a query you didn't expect, that's a clue about what the AI thinks you do.
• +In topics where you already appear, update and deepen those pages: dated figures, examples, sources and a clear answer up top. Bing points out that clear headings, tables and FAQ sections help information get found and cited correctly.
• +Review the opportunity queries, drop the ones with other brands in them, and keep those your business can answer better than anyone. For those, a new page or a new section in an existing one.
• +Skip huge topics with hundreds of cited sites if you're just starting: a small, less contested topic usually pays off sooner.
• +Check again every month with the same period. What matters is the trend, not a single number.

What AI Performance doesn't tell you

It's the first official window into AI citations, but it's a window into a single engine. It doesn't measure clicks or visits: for that you have to cross-check with your analytics. It doesn't say where in the answer you appeared, or whether you were recommended or just used as the source of a fact. And it says nothing about ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini, which run their own search systems.

That's why, in serious GEO measurement, Bing is one more piece, not the whole dashboard. What does change is that, for Copilot, you no longer have to guess: there's platform data to check your sample against. If you're deciding who to hire for this, in GEO agency: how to pick one we cover which measurement to demand in writing.

If you want a first diagnosis before opening any console, our GEO Radar is free. And if you'd rather we do it, at loco22 the GEO audit includes your baseline in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini plus a prioritized 90-day plan.