Bing Webmaster Tools Now Shows AI Citation Performance Helping Publishers

Artificial intelligence is clearly changing the way people find information online. Instead of clicking blue links only, users can get direct answers from AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries now.

To enable publishers to have better knowledge, Microsoft has introduced a new AI Performance dashboard inside the Bing Webmaster Tools.

This finally shows how website content performs inside AI-generated answers.

What Is the AI Performance Dashboard?

The AI Performance dashboard is now a new addition as a reporting feature currently available in public preview.

It shows how often your website content is cited as a source in AI-powered experiences such as Copilot, Bing AI answers, and selected partner integrations.

Until now, you as a publisher could see clicks and impressions from search. But you had no clear visibility into how AI systems were using content.

This dashboard changes that by focusing specifically on AI citations, and not traditional rankings.

Key Metrics You Can Now Track

Microsoft has brought 4 new core metrics that make AI visibility measurable and actionable.

1. Total Citations

This shows how many times your content was referenced as a source in AI-generated answers during a selected time period. It helps you understand your overall presence in AI responses.

2. Average Cited Pages

This metric displays the daily average number of unique URLs from your site that were cited. It tells you how many different pages AI systems rely on regularly.

3. Page-Level Citation Data

You can see which specific pages on your site are cited the most and how their citation activity changes over time. This helps identify content that AI trusts and surfaces frequently.

4. Grounding Queries

Grounding queries are the search phrases or prompts that AI uses to retrieve your content. Microsoft clarifies that this is not a complete list, but it still offers valuable insight into how AI connects user questions with your pages.

Why This Update Is Important?

As a first of its kind, Bing Webmaster Tools has provided direct reporting on AI-generated citations. While Google Search Console includes AI Overviews within its overall performance data, it does not offer a dedicated AI citation report or page-level AI attribution.

Bing’s approach is deeper. It explains

• Which URLs are cited
• How often they are cited
• What phrases triggered those citations
• How trends change over time

For everyone publishing and doing the SEO in the backend, this replaces guesswork with real data.

What This Means for SEO and Content Strategy?

With AI citation data, most teams that manage content can:

• Identify pages that AI prefers to reference
• Improve content depth and clarity around grounding queries
• Optimize high-performing pages for authority and accuracy
• Track AI visibility separately from traditional search traffic

This can be very useful as AI answers increasingly influence user behavior.

What’s in Store?

Microsoft has revealed that the AI Performance dashboard will continue to develop as more data is processed. This update is part of its larger effort to unify search and AI insights inside Bing Webmaster Tools.

This is also critical alongside newer comparison features and content control options.