For years, site owners have had solid tools for understanding how their content performs in traditional search. What they haven’t had is any real visibility into how their work shows up inside AI answers, copilots, and chat-style search experiences. Microsoft’s new AI Performance feature in Bing Webmaster Tools, now in Public Preview, finally opens that black box. And for anyone who depends on search visibility, this is a big deal. AI-driven discovery isn’t a side channel anymore. It’s becoming the main way people find information.
The new dashboard shows how often your content is cited as a source in AI-generated answers across Bing’s supported experiences. It introduces several metrics that make this world a lot easier to understand.
Total Citations shows how often your content is referenced in AI answers during a selected time frame. It’s a frequency measure, not a ranking signal. Average Cited Pages shows how many unique pages from your site appear as sources per day. Since this is aggregated across multiple AI surfaces, it reflects broad patterns rather than authority. Grounding Queries reveal the key phrases AI systems use when retrieving your content. Microsoft notes this is a sample of overall activity and will continue to evolve. Page-level Citation Activity highlights which specific URLs are most frequently referenced. The Visibility Trends Over Time chart shows how citation activity rises or falls across supported AI experiences.
Microsoft also makes one thing clear: Bing respects all content owner preferences expressed through robots.txt and other supported controls.
Why This Matters
AI answers are already reshaping traffic patterns, often in ways that traditional SEO tools can’t detect. Until now, publishers had no way to see when their content was being used in AI responses or whether those appearances led to engagement. AI Performance gives them a starting point for understanding how their work travels through this new ecosystem.
The dashboard isn’t just a reporting tool. It can help guide content strategy. By reviewing cited pages and grounding queries, you can see which topics already resonate in AI answers and where there’s room to improve.
Microsoft suggests a few practical approaches:
- Strengthen depth and expertise in areas where your content is already being cited.
- Improve structure and clarity with headings, tables, and FAQs that make information easier for AI systems to reference.
- Support claims with examples, data, and citations to build trust when content is reused.
- Keep content fresh so AI systems reference the most current version.
- Reduce ambiguity across text, images, and video so concepts are consistently represented.
Keeping Content Fresh With IndexNow
Freshness matters even more in AI-driven experiences. Microsoft highlights IndexNow as a way to ensure updated content is quickly discovered. By notifying participating search engines whenever content changes, IndexNow helps AI systems reference the latest version of your pages.
Local Businesses Get a Boost Too
For local businesses, accurate information is essential when AI experiences surface answers to location-based queries. Microsoft recommends using Bing Places for Business to keep details like address, hours, and contact information current and eligible for inclusion in AI-generated responses.
