For a while, the honest answer to "is AI recommending my site?" was a mystery. That changed this year. Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, the first time a major platform showed publishers when their content is cited in AI answers. Turn it on. Then be clear-eyed about what it is, and what it is not.
In February 2026, Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, the first time a major platform showed publishers when their content is cited in AI answers. In June it expanded with four new views: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare (Search Engine Land has the rundown). If you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account, turn it on. It is free, first-party, and worth watching.
Microsoft is refreshingly honest about what it is. Citation Share, they write, "does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores"; it is "an observational metric, not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard." That honesty is the point. Bing's AI Performance is a thermometer. It tells you the temperature. It is not the diagnosis. Here are four things even the new metrics will not tell you.
Bing shows your own citation counts and now your share of citations for a query. What it deliberately will not show is the one thing you most want when you are not cited: who was. When Copilot answers "best noise-cancelling headphones" with three sources and none are you, those three names are the whole game. They tell you who the model trusts on your topic and what those pages do that yours does not. Knowing your share dropped is a reading. Knowing which competitor replaced you is a plan.
Bing's data covers Copilot, Bing and select partners. That is a real and growing slice, but it is one vendor's slice. It says nothing about whether ChatGPT recommends you, whether Claude cites your docs, whether Perplexity links you, or whether Gemini grounds its answer in your page. Your customers ask all of them. You can be a darling in Copilot and invisible in ChatGPT, and this dashboard will never hint at the gap. If you want the whole map, you have to check each engine yourself.
AI Performance reports that you were cited and the queries that triggered it. It does not hand you the receipt: the specific passage an assistant used, or independent proof that a verified AI crawler actually fetched your page around the time the answer was generated. A count says "you appeared". A receipt says "here is the sentence the assistant lifted, and here is the log line showing OpenAI's crawler, confirmed by reverse DNS and its published ranges, reading that exact page during the scan window". One you can screenshot for a licensing conversation. The other you take on faith.
Intents and Topics cluster your grounding queries into subject areas. That helps you see the forest. What it stops short of is the page-level version: "you already rank #4 in classic search for this query, you have real demand for it, and yet AI cites a competitor instead. Here is the URL to strengthen." That join, between queries you already win and the ones AI overlooks, is where the fastest wins live, and a single-engine observational report is not built to give it.
None of this is a knock on Bing. AI Performance is a good, honest tool, and Microsoft shipped it before anyone else. Watch it. But treat it for what it is: a first-party signal that the temperature is changing, on one important set of surfaces. When the temperature moves and you need to know why, who took your spot, on which assistant, using which passage, on which page you can fix, you need the layer underneath the number. That is the difference between a visibility score and an evidence layer. A score is a reading. Evidence is a receipt.
It is a report in Bing Webmaster Tools, launched February 2026 and expanded in June 2026 with Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare, that shows when and how often your content is cited across Microsoft Copilot, Bing and select partner AI experiences. It is free, first-party and worth turning on. It is a genuine milestone. It is also one vendor’s slice.
No. Microsoft states plainly that Citation Share "does not expose competitor domains". That is a reasonable privacy choice on their part, but when Copilot answers your topic with three sources and none are you, the names of those three sources are the whole game — they tell you who the model trusts and what those pages do that yours does not.
No. Its data covers Microsoft Copilot, Bing and select partners. A publisher can be a citation darling in Copilot and completely invisible in ChatGPT, and Bing’s dashboard will never hint at the gap. Single-engine visibility is a real number; it just is not the whole map.
The receipt: the specific passage an assistant lifted, and independent proof that a verified crawler fetched your page around the time the answer was generated. And the page-level join between queries you already win in classic search and the ones AI overlooks, which is where the fastest wins live.
Cross-engine evidence versus a single modelled number.
Read it →Check every engine yourself, not just one.
Read it →Five models, your real questions, who they name.
Read it →Unsourced captures which AI assistants cite you, proves which crawlers really fetched your pages, and re-checks after you act — evidence, not a score.
© Unsourced — the evidence layer for AI search.