Bing AI and Copilot consulting: content that gets cited in answers, and measured.

We wrote this guide for ecommerce, corporate site and publisher teams who want to appear as a source in Bing AI experiences (in Copilot and in Bing’s artificial intelligence (AI) answers) but can’t see where their site stands in the Bing index or how often it’s cited in these answers. Every mechanism we describe is based on official documentation: Bing Webmaster guidelines and help pages, Bing and Microsoft Advertising blog posts, the Microsoft Copilot transparency note and the IndexNow protocol’s own documentation. We verified product names and report coverage against the source as of September 2026; because Microsoft updates this area often, we check them again during setup. Our own field observations are marked separately under the heading “Expert note”.

We cover the general framework for visibility in AI answers, including the more capable systems now discussed as superintelligence (ASI), on our GEO consulting page. This guide goes down into the mechanisms specific to Bing and Copilot: the Bing index, IndexNow, quotable content, page-level controls and citation measurement.

What is Bing AI, and where does it appear?

Bing AI is the everyday name for Microsoft’s AI experiences that answer questions from web sources and show those sources as links; today these experiences appear in Microsoft Copilot, in Copilot Search on Bing and in Bing’s AI-generated summaries. People also search for the same experiences as “Bing Copilot”. According to Bing’s guidelines, the rules for how content is discovered, indexed and shown apply together to Bing search, Copilot and grounding API results (programmatic access that grounds an answer in web sources).¹ The AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations across three surfaces: Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner AI integrations; the documentation doesn’t name these partners.²

When Microsoft announced Copilot Search on 4 April 2025, it said the feature was available worldwide except in Russia and China.³ Language is a separate variable: according to Microsoft’s Copilot transparency note, performance can vary by language, and at launch the best results were achieved in English.⁴ We don’t assume how it performs for questions in other languages, such as Turkish; we read it from the site’s own data.

How does a Copilot answer rely on the Bing index?

In information-seeking conversations, Copilot can turn to web search, summarize its answer from top results in the Bing index, and list the pages it used as linked citations below the text.⁴ Bing’s guidelines say that the Bing and Copilot search experiences rest on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as classic search; so whether a page can be a source in Copilot depends first on it being in the Bing index.¹ The same document recommends NOINDEX for any URL that shouldn’t appear in Bing, Copilot or grounding results, and notes that timely notification through IndexNow helps reduce references to outdated or incorrect URLs in Copilot answers.¹

In Copilot Search, the source side is more visible: according to Microsoft, whole sentences or paragraphs are linked to their source, and sources are highlighted at the top and bottom of the page.³ We look at two things to get a page among these sources: Bing keeping the page current in its index, and the information on the page being written clearly enough to answer the question on its own.

How do you add and verify a site in Bing Webmaster Tools?

There are two ways to add a site to Bing Webmaster Tools: import verified sites from Google Search Console, or enter the URL manually and verify ownership.⁵ The import screen lists your verified Search Console sites together with their sitemaps, and the selected sites are verified automatically; Bing then periodically re-verifies ownership through the Search Console account and also picks up any new sitemaps it finds there.⁵ For manual addition there are four verification methods: automatic DNS verification with DNS providers that support Domain Connect, a BingSiteAuth.xml file uploaded to the root directory, a meta tag added to the page’s head section, and a CNAME record added to DNS.⁵ Once a site is added, data usually takes 48 hours to appear.⁵

We open the account in your name and handle verification; the Bing Webmaster Tools account, the Search Console connection and the DNS records stay with you, and our team is added to the account as a user. We run markention.com on the same stack: Bing Webmaster Tools, Search Console, GA4 and Clarity work together.

What do sitemaps and links tell Bing?

A sitemap tells Bing which URLs matter and when they changed; links tell it where pages sit on the site and how findable they are. Bing lists four signals for discovery: IndexNow notifications, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and external links from relevant sites.¹ Its criteria for sitemaps are clear: list only canonical URLs, make the sitemap reflect the site structure, remove deleted or redirected URLs immediately, and add freshness signals such as lastmod where appropriate; accurate lastmod values and HTTP validation headers such as ETag help content changes be detected more reliably.¹ A sitemap isn’t a visibility guarantee either.¹

Internal links are built with standard a href elements and meaningful anchor text. Serving the same content at several URLs splits the signal and lowers Bing’s confidence in choosing one URL for grounding or citation.¹ A 301 is recommended for permanent moves and a 302 only for temporary changes shorter than two days; deleted content returns 404, and the change is notified through IndexNow.¹ Critical content isn’t left to client-side rendering; Bing writes that content that can’t be rendered reliably may not be indexed or selected for grounding.¹

How does IndexNow work?

IndexNow is a protocol that tells search engines, in a single request, when a URL has been added, updated or deleted; search engines that join the protocol agree to automatically share the URLs they receive with the other participants.⁶ The endpoint list in the protocol’s FAQ includes Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep alongside the shared IndexNow endpoint (api.indexnow.org); whichever of these a notification is sent to, it’s shared with every search engine that supports IndexNow.⁷ For a site serving a market where Yandex matters, such as Türkiye, this means a single notification reaches Yandex as well as Bing. Setup takes four steps:

1. Key: a key of letters, numbers and hyphens, between 8 and 128 characters long, is generated, and a UTF-8 text file containing the key and named after it is placed in the site’s root directory; a file in another location is declared with the keyLocation variable.⁶
2. Single URL: the changed URL is sent in a single HTTP request carrying the url and key parameters; the URL is encoded in line with RFC 3986.⁶
3. Bulk submission: up to 10,000 URLs are sent in a single POST request with a JSON body carrying the host, key and urlList fields.⁶
4. Response: the returned status code is read; a 200 only shows that the URL was received.⁶

The protocol’s response codes and how we respond during setup:⁶

Submission frequency has rules too. Bing recommends sending notifications as changes happen rather than batching them up;¹ the IndexNow FAQ says not to submit the same URL many times a day without a meaningful change, to wait at least 5 minutes on frequently updated pages, and to notify URLs that return 404 or 410 as well.⁷ The IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools shows where submissions came from (a plugin, Cloudflare or direct submission) and the crawl and index status of a sample of submitted URLs; the “Important URLs Missed” section lists important URLs that were indexed in the last 7 days but not notified through IndexNow; this is where we see what the integration missed.⁸

How do you verify that Bingbot really is Bingbot?

Bingbot’s identity is verified not by the user-agent string but by matching the requesting IP address with a reverse and forward DNS lookup, or against the IP list Bing publishes. For a request in your logs that says “bingbot/2.0”, Bing recommends verifying it with these steps:⁹

1. Reverse DNS: a reverse DNS lookup is run for the IP in the log; the returned name must end in search.msn.com.⁹
2. Forward DNS: a forward lookup is run for the returned name; the result must match the IP in the log.⁹
3. IP list: instead of DNS lookups, the request’s IP can also be matched against the bingbot.json list Bing publishes; because Bing says it can change the list at any time, the list is refreshed daily and IP addresses and ranges aren’t hard-coded.⁹
4. Decision: if the name and the IP match, the request is Bingbot; if not, it’s reported separately as an impostor.

The goal is not to write the wrong rules by mistaking impostor traffic for Bingbot, and not to stop the real Bingbot by accident. Bing’s guidelines explicitly list blocking Bingbot in robots.txt among things to avoid, and remind you that robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing.¹ We explain how to manage other AI crawlers bot by bot on our AI access control page.

Copilot SEO: how do you write content Copilot can quote?

Content Copilot can quote is content whose every part makes sense on its own when it’s split into pieces, can be verified and stays focused on a single topic. A Microsoft Advertising blog post from October 2025 writes that assistants such as Copilot break content into small, structured pieces through parsing and evaluate them for authority and relevance.¹⁰ The criteria in Bing’s guidelines line up with this: the key information comes at the top of the page and long introductions are avoided; each URL focuses on one main topic; facts and definitions are stated clearly, and important information is visible on the page itself.¹

• Headings: descriptive H2 and H3 headings work like section titles that define slices of content for AI systems.¹⁰
• Question and answer: direct question-and-answer pairs are a format assistants can often lift into an answer word for word.¹⁰
• Hidden content: important answers aren’t hidden in tabs or dropdowns; AI systems may not render hidden content, and important details can be missed.¹⁰
• Entity names: names of people, organizations, products and locations are written consistently and without ambiguity.¹
• Structured data: accurately reflects the visible content; according to Bing, structured data can help grounding but doesn’t guarantee visibility.¹

What do NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE change in Copilot?

NOCACHE allows a page to be referenced in Copilot only by its URL, title and short description (snippet); NOARCHIVE stops the page from being shown as a link in Copilot.¹¹ Bing announced the effect of these two values in Bing Chat in September 2023 and wrote that tagged content would continue to appear in search results;¹² today’s help document describes the same rules for Copilot.¹¹ The rules are set with the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header; with name=”bingbot”, they apply to Bing only.¹¹

Snippet controls have a cost too. Bing writes that nosnippet and data-nosnippet remove the description in search results and can limit the quality of Copilot citations, and that NOCACHE reduces citation depth and answer quality; it recommends avoiding NOCACHE on content where rich citations in Copilot are wanted.¹

How do you measure Bing AI visibility?

Bing AI visibility is read from three separate sources: citations in the AI Performance report, index and search data in Bing Webmaster Tools, and Copilot-referred visits in analytics. The AI Performance report shows which pages your site is cited with, the trend over time and related grounding queries.² Total citations, unique pages cited per day and their average are the report’s core measures; grounding queries are short, grouped phrases the AI system uses when retrieving content, not the user’s full question.²

Microsoft draws the same distinction: a citation says your content was visibly credited as a source in the answer; it doesn’t mean traffic, clicks or engagement.² The data is sampled and refreshed daily with a short delay, very infrequent citations may not show in the dashboard, and the data can be exported as CSV or Excel.² Intents, Topics, Citation Share and period comparison (Compare) have been added to the report as previews; citation share shows your site’s percentage of all citations for a grounding query and doesn’t name the other sites.² According to Bing’s guidelines, a drop in clicks doesn’t always mean a loss of visibility either.¹

How do Bing AI consulting services work in the first 30 days?

The job of the first 30 days is to measure where the site stands in Bing today, close index and tag errors, and read the measurement with the first data.

1. Week 1 · Account and inventory: Bing Webmaster Tools is set up in your name, or access to the existing account is obtained; sitemaps, index status, robots.txt and the robots tags in page templates are mapped out.
2. Week 2 · Index and IndexNow: sitemaps are trimmed to canonical URLs, the IndexNow key and notifications are set up, and Bingbot requests are verified in the logs.
3. Week 3 · Content and controls: on priority pages the key information is moved to the top, entity names and structured data are matched to the visible content, and nocache, noarchive and nosnippet decisions are written page by page.
4. Week 4 · First reading: AI Performance, the IndexNow report and analytics are read together; cited pages, grounding queries and URLs IndexNow missed are reported.

Bing AI consultant, SEO agency or in-house team?

Bing and Copilot work can be run three ways. The difference is who takes on the Bing-specific controls: Bing Webmaster Tools, IndexNow, NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE, and the AI Performance report.

We run Bing work on the same calendar as general SEO and GEO work, so shared tasks aren’t done twice and Bing-specific setups are documented separately.

How to choose a Bing AI consultant

1. Account ownership: the Bing Webmaster Tools account, DNS records and IndexNow key file stay in your name; the partner is added as a user.
2. Tag audit: the first audit reads the robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag header on every template; any noarchive or nocache that shuts out Copilot shows up in writing.
3. What triggers IndexNow: notifications are sent only on real content changes, so crawl quota isn’t wasted on needless submissions.
4. Citations and visits kept apart: the report lists AI Performance citations and Copilot visits from analytics on separate lines; a citation is never presented as a click.
5. Guarantee language: no one promises a Copilot citation or a set number of citations; Bing’s own guidelines say there is no such guarantee.
6. Decisions stay with you: choices such as keeping a page out of Copilot are presented with reasons and applied with your approval.

Bing AI consulting pricing: what drives the cost?

The fee for Bing AI consulting depends on scope; instead of a fixed package price, we share estimated ranges. The main factors:

We work out the scope together in the first meeting and then send a written proposal; a one-off setup and ongoing monitoring can be discussed as separate items.

Bing AI consulting pricing: estimated ranges

Estimated range, excluding VAT; rows marked “/ month” are monthly, the others are one-off. Scope is confirmed in a written proposal after the first meeting. As of October 2026.

Whoever you work with, we suggest getting concrete answers to three questions: how is the Bing index audited, which event triggers IndexNow notifications, and how are citations and visits measured separately? To see how AI assistants describe your brand today, you can run our free AI visibility analysis. If you’d like to read your site’s current position in Bing and Copilot together, pick a meeting day that suits you below.