Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, available as a standalone app and built into Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365. When it answers with information from the web, it grounds the response in Bing's index and cites the pages it used, which makes Bing visibility a direct input to Copilot visibility.

The product has been reorganized several times. On March 17, 2026, Microsoft merged its consumer and commercial Copilot teams under Jacob Andreou, freeing Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman to focus on building Microsoft's own models. In August and September 2026 it began moving consumer Copilot users and Microsoft 365 Copilot users into a single updated Copilot app, and it retired consumer features including Podcasts, Deep Research and Group Chat after August 18, 2026. Copilot uses models from OpenAI and Anthropic alongside Microsoft's in-house MAI models.

Consumer reach is modest compared with the leaders. Sensor Tower data cited by CNBC put the Copilot app at about 6 million daily active users in February 2026, against 440 million for ChatGPT and 82 million for Gemini. The larger footprint is at work: Microsoft 365 Copilot answers questions for employees using company data plus web results, which matters for B2B brands whose buyers research vendors inside Office tools.

The Bing connection is what makes Copilot practical to optimize. Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview on February 10, 2026. It reports how often a verified site is cited across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations, with total citations, average cited pages per day, page-level citation counts and grounding queries, the phrases Copilot used when it retrieved the cited content. Microsoft notes that grounding queries are a sample and that citation counts do not indicate placement or importance within an answer. As of early 2026 the report had no API, so exports are manual.

Several levers follow from the Bing dependency:

• Make sure Bingbot can crawl the site; Copilot has no publicly documented crawler of its own, so blocking Bingbot removes you from its grounding
• Submit changes through IndexNow, which Microsoft recommends so AI answers reference the latest version of a page
• Keep XML sitemaps accurate and verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools
• For local businesses, keep Bing Places listings current, since Copilot draws on them for location questions
• Use the grounding queries report to see which phrasings retrieve your pages and where coverage is thin

Copilot visibility is related to Bing rankings but not the same thing. Copilot may synthesize an answer from several pages, select individual passages and run its own queries, so a page can rank well in Bing and still go uncited. Bing's first-party report shows only your own citations, not competitors', so teams that need share of voice or answer text typically pair it with prompt tracking on the live Copilot interface, compared against ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews as part of cross-platform AI visibility. Promptwatch's Bing Webmaster connection, for example, places Bing clicks (which include Copilot traffic) next to AI citations, as described in our post on Google and Bing search insights.