Most people still think of Bing as “the other search engine”. In reality, Bing now sits behind a lot of everyday AI tools, especially in larger organisations that run on Microsoft 365. If your content is not visible in Bing, you are missing a growing part of the search and discovery journey.
Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot in Bing use short Bing queries behind the scenes to pull in current information from the web when they answer questions. Copilot in Edge and Copilot Search are embedded in Windows, the Edge browser and Microsoft 365 apps, and they draw heavily from Bing’s search index. That means your visibility in Bing influences what staff see when they search at work, and often when they search for personal things on work devices as well.
Where Bing Shows Up Every Day
Bing is no longer just a website you visit at bing.com. It now appears in several places that matter for small business visibility:
- Copilot in Bing – integrated into the Bing search engine as an AI chat tool that summarises articles, compares products and gives detailed answers on top of search results.
- Copilot in Edge – available in the Edge browser sidebar, helping users summarise web pages and documents, rewrite text and search without leaving their tab.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot – built into apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with Business Chat accessible from Bing when people are signed in with their work account.
- Copilot Search – a unified search experience inside the Microsoft 365 Copilot app that lets users ask questions in natural language and find information across their organisation and the web.
When web search is enabled, Copilot sends short queries to Bing to ground its responses in current web information, then shows a “sources” panel with the Bing query and the websites it used. For B2B, this is crucial: staff searching inside Copilot at work are seeing Bing‑powered answers by default. Even for personal topics, many organisations restrict non‑enterprise tools and route staff to Copilot and Bing instead.
If you want your brand to be part of what these teams see and trust, you need to show up strongly in Bing and in the AI features built on top of it.
From Rankings to AI Citations
Traditional SEO focuses on where your site ranks in search results. That still matters. But as AI answers and Copilot responses take up more space on the page, it is no longer the whole story.
Microsoft’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools shows when your content is cited inside AI generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI summaries and selected partner experiences. Instead of only counting clicks, it tracks how often AI systems pull in your pages as sources, and which queries triggered those citations.
This introduces a new visibility question: not just “Are we on page one?” but “Are we one of the sources AI tools stand on when they answer our customers’ questions?”
What AI Citations Are In Plain Language
When someone types or speaks a prompt into Copilot or Bing, the system generates a short Bing search query, sends it to Bing and retrieves relevant pages. Those retrieval queries are called grounding queries.
If your page is used in the answer, that’s an AI citation. The AI Performance report shows:
- Total citations – how often your pages were referenced.
- Cited pages – which URLs are used most often.
- Grounding queries – the exact phrases Bing used to find your content.
For a small business, this is a deeper form of visibility. It means your content is trusted enough that Copilot and Bing will quote or summarise it when people ask about your topic, whether they are a business user searching at work or a consumer on their laptop.
Intents and Topics: Understanding the “WHY” and “WHAT”
Microsoft has expanded AI Performance with four new insight types: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare.
- Intents classify grounding queries into categories such as Informational, Commercial, Research, Learn & Solve and Local. In simple terms, intent shows why someone is searching – learning, buying, solving a problem or finding something nearby.
- Topics group related queries into broader themes, mirroring how AI systems organise information. For example, “solar panels”, “solar energy efficiency” and “solar rebates Adelaide” might sit under a “Solar energy” topic.
Seeing which Intents and Topics drive citations for your site helps you understand the role you are playing in customers’ journeys. If most citations for your accounting firm are Informational and Learn & Solve queries, you might be educating people on compliance and systems. If Local and Commercial intents are strong, you are closer to buying decisions for nearby clients.
Why Bing AI Matters for Small Business Owners
Microsoft’s own advice for small business SEO focuses on clear sites, user‑friendly content and long‑term authority, not hacks. Bing’s AI Performance report and the embedding of Bing in Copilot simply extend that philosophy into AI search.
If you:
- Build simple, accurate, helpful content around the topics you want to be known for.
- Make it easy for Bing to read your site and understand your structure.
- Show up consistently over time.
You increase your chances of being cited in AI answers and in Bing search, across the many surfaces where Bing now lives.ai-solutions.
When you are ready to turn this understanding into practical steps, read my guide on setting up Bing for sustainable, purpose‑led visibility.
