Microsoft Copilot is the brand name for Microsoft's AI assistants. The consumer Copilot and Copilot Search in Bing answer questions with web results from Bing's index and show citations. Copilot is also built into the Edge browser, Windows and, for business users, Microsoft 365. For B2B SaaS companies, that last placement matters: many buyers use Copilot inside the same tools they work in every day.
Why Bing matters again
Copilot's web answers draw on Bing. That means Bing indexing, which many SEO teams have treated as an afterthought, is a prerequisite for appearing in Copilot's cited answers. Bing has also been widely reported as one of the search sources behind other AI products, which raises its importance further.
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Submit XML sitemaps there and check for crawl errors.
- Consider IndexNow for faster notification of new and changed URLs.
- Check that Bingbot is not blocked by CDN rules.
Measuring Copilot visibility
Microsoft has started reporting some AI-related data for publishers in Bing Webmaster Tools, but what is available changes, so check the current reports rather than relying on a fixed list. Referral traffic from Copilot can arrive from copilot.microsoft.com, bing.com or Edge surfaces, and some may be counted as direct. Prompt tracking across Copilot remains the most direct way to see how your brand is described.
Example
A neglected Bing setup
Larkspool, a fictional legal tech company, appears in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers but rarely in Copilot. Bing Webmaster Tools shows that a large part of its docs subdomain was never indexed, because the sitemap had only been submitted to Google. Submitting sitemaps to Bing and fixing a redirect loop on the docs root are the first fixes.
Common mistakes
Ignoring Bing
If Bing cannot index a page, Copilot is unlikely to cite it, and other products that use Bing may miss it too.
Assuming Microsoft 365 Copilot sees the public web the same way
Business Copilot often answers from an organization's own data, and web access can be controlled by admins. Visibility there depends on the customer's settings.
Questions
Microsoft has used OpenAI models alongside its own and others, and the mix changes. It does not usually matter for visibility as much as Bing indexing does.
Copilot Search is an AI answer experience within Bing. Classic Bing results still exist alongside it.
