Bing Webmaster Tools: Microsoft's platform for SEO and AI visibility

Definition

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free platform for monitoring and optimising your website's visibility in Bing – including how often your content is cited in AI-generated answers from Microsoft Copilot and Bing.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) is Microsoft's free platform for website owners and SEO specialists who want to monitor and optimise their visibility in Bing. Since February 2026, the platform has also shown how often content is cited in answers from Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. It is Bing's counterpart to Google Search Console, but with an increasingly clear focus on AI visibility and AEO-specific reporting.

What is AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools?

AI Performance is the report in Bing Webmaster Tools that shows how often your content is cited as a source in AI-generated answers. Microsoft launched it as a public preview in February 2026. It covers Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and selected partner integrations. Microsoft does not disclose who the partners are.

June 2026 brought search intent, topics, Citation Share and period comparison. In October 2026, the report gained a second tab, Topics Portfolio, alongside Citations & Pages. The report is still in public preview, and Topics Portfolio is labelled beta.

What does the Citations & Pages tab show?

Citations & Pages is the core of the report. At the top, it shows two figures for the selected period. Total Citations is how many times your pages have been shown as a source. Avg. Cited Pages is the average number of different pages cited per day. You can set the period from 7 days to 6 months, and Compare overlays an earlier period on the selected one.

Below the chart, the data is listed in two ways:

• Grounding Queries – the search phrases the AI used when it retrieved the content it then cited. These are the AI's own searches and may differ from what the user typed. Each query has a search intent (the Intent column, for example Informational, Learn and Solve, Research or Local), a topic, a number of citations and a Citation Share
• Pages – the number of citations per page on your website

Citation Share is your share of all the citations shown for a given search phrase, as a percentage. It is calculated per search phrase and is not available for pages. According to Microsoft, it only describes what has been shown. It says nothing about which competitors share the rest, or about traffic.

The data is a sample of all activity. The search intent and topic labels are assigned by AI and can be wrong. On seosdesign.se, for example, the Swedish query "strukturerad data" (structured data) ends up under the topic Data Engineering & Big Data.

What is Topics Portfolio?

Topics Portfolio is a beta tab in AI Performance that Bing launched on 13 October 2026. In the interface itself, it is called Topic Portfolio. The tab groups your grounding queries by topic and shows how big each topic is across all cited websites. For each topic, it shows Topic Size (the approximate number of citations for all websites), Sites Cited (how many websites are cited) and Queries (how many different queries the topic contains).

Below the table is a list of Top Opportunity Queries: queries where other websites are cited but yours is not, with the volume given as a range. The period covers one, two or three whole months. The tab only appears for websites with enough data.

For a Swedish-language website, the tab currently offers little to plan from. When we tested it on seosdesign.se in October 2026, one of around 230 opportunity queries was in Swedish, even though Bing says the list is tailored to your website. There is no filter for language or market. The top of the list was dominated by "google search console" in nine different spellings and by queries about AI tools such as Claude Code and Grok. Bing itself says the figures are a rough guide for planning, not exact values. Use Citations & Pages as your starting point when you prioritise, and look at the tab again if it becomes possible to filter for Swedish queries.

Measuring AI visibility

There are plenty of third-party tools that promise to measure your AI visibility – but they share a fundamental problem: AI rarely gives the same answer twice. Every measurement is a snapshot, not a stable picture. Reaching statistical significance takes advanced methodology and a large data set, which most tools currently lack. For most companies, expensive AI tracking tools are hard to justify.

Since August 2026, Google Search Console has also reported AI visibility, but without search queries (the difference is explained further down). Bing Webmaster Tools is still the only known source of actual citation data per query – not a modelled estimate. Copilot also reaches more people than just those who search on Bing, because it is built into several Microsoft products.

Bing's openness is likely to put pressure on Google to report the queries as well. If Google does, many standalone AI measurement tools will become less necessary. For now, they fill a gap that the first-hand sources will eventually close. Our advice: use Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console now. If you are considering a paid tool, use it as a diagnostic and never as a KPI.

How to verify and get started

Bing Webmaster Tools is free, but you need to verify that you own your domain. There are four ways to do this:

• DNS record – Add a TXT record in your domain registrar's DNS settings
• HTML tag – Add a meta tag to the <head> section of the page
• XML file – Upload a verification file to the root directory
• Sync with GSC – Import websites that are already verified in Google Search Console.

Once your website is verified, the overview gives you search, crawl and indexing data. Submit your sitemap.xml for faster, more complete crawling. You will find the platform at Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console

The two platforms share the same basic functions: search data and reports on crawling and index status. Both now also report AI visibility – Bing since February 2026 and Search Console for all websites since August 2026. The difference is depth. Search Console reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device, but no clicks and no search queries. Bing Webmaster Tools shows which queries led to your content being cited, your share of the citations for each query and which pages were cited. For anyone working on AEO, BWT data therefore offers clues you can use when optimising for Google too.