How to rank in Microsoft Copilot

To rank in Microsoft Copilot, a page has to be in Bing's index and be chosen when Copilot grounds an answer in web search. Microsoft says Copilot "generates a search query that it sends to the Bing search service" (opens in a new tab), and Bing says Copilot relies on "the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search" (opens in a new tab). So let Bingbot crawl the page, get it indexed in Bing, keep NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE off it, and put key facts in server-rendered text.

Microsoft documents more of this route than most AI companies do. It names the search service, publishes controls for how Copilot may use a page, and gives site owners a citation report. It does not explain how Copilot chooses among search results, beyond saying that Copilot centers its response on "high-ranking content from the web" (opens in a new tab). This guide keeps Microsoft's documentation apart from outside studies. It is one of a set on how AI assistants find and cite sources, and its sources were checked on September 27, 2026.

Scope and definitions

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant. It comes in two main forms, and both can search the web:

• Copilot for individuals is the Microsoft Copilot app, including copilot.microsoft.com, used with a personal Microsoft account. Microsoft describes how it works in a Transparency Note for Microsoft Copilot (for individuals) (opens in a new tab).
• Copilot for work is used with a work or school account. Microsoft has renamed these products: "Microsoft 365 Copilot is now named Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now named Microsoft Copilot Chat" (opens in a new tab). The work versions can also answer from an organization's own files and email. This guide covers only public web pages.

Work to be cited in AI answers is called answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO). Bing's guidelines use the second name and say GEO "focuses on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses" (opens in a new tab).

• Grounding is basing an answer on retrieved sources. Bing says it "refers to the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response" (opens in a new tab).
• Bingbot is Bing's crawler. Bing's guidelines ask site owners to "Allow Bingbot to crawl and render content efficiently" (opens in a new tab).
• A grounding query is, in Bing's words, one of "the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers" (opens in a new tab).
• A citation is a link to a source shown with the answer.
• IndexNow is a protocol for telling participating search engines, Bing among them, that a URL was added, changed, or removed.

How Copilot finds and cites pages

Where Copilot's web results come from

Microsoft's documentation describes the source of Copilot's web results as follows (official documentation):

The Transparency Note for the personal app does not name Bing. Microsoft's advertising team does: "Powered by Bing's search index, experiences like Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Start, and others handle billions of queries each month" (opens in a new tab) (company blog, October 2025).

When Copilot searches, and what it searches for

Copilot does not search for every prompt. In the personal app, once a prompt passes Microsoft's safety filters, "a determination is made if the request requires grounding data from the web and which language model should respond to the request" (opens in a new tab). When it does search, Copilot "will use the top web search results to generate a summary" (opens in a new tab) with citations. In the work versions, Copilot searches when information from the web "helps to provide a better, more grounded response" (opens in a new tab).

The query Copilot sends to Bing is not the user's prompt. Microsoft says it differs from the prompt and "consists of a few words informed by the user's prompt" (opens in a new tab). In Microsoft's example, a request to summarize financial information about a company called Fabrikam produced two searches: "Fabrikam strategy" and "Fabrikam financials" (opens in a new tab). A page is therefore found through short keyword searches of the kind Bing has always answered. Our reading, which Microsoft has not stated: a company should rank in Bing for short queries such as its name with "pricing," "reviews," or "alternatives," and for the short forms of its buyers' questions.

Copilot Chat shows these queries. Microsoft displays the exact web search queries sent to Bing in the citation section of the response (opens in a new tab). They appear only in Copilot Chat, not in the Copilot pane inside apps such as Word, and only for 24 hours in the chat thread (opens in a new tab). That gives a site owner a direct way to see how a buyer's question becomes searches: ask Copilot Chat the question and read the queries.

How Bing ranks results

Bing publishes the main parameters it uses to rank pages, "listed in general order of importance" (opens in a new tab): relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and language, and page load time (official documentation, last updated March 2025). Under quality and credibility, Bing judges reputation with a question: "What types of other websites link to the site? A well-known news site is considered to have a higher reputation than a brand-new blog." (opens in a new tab) Bing also says that websites cannot pay to improve their organic ranking (opens in a new tab).

These parameters describe Bing search. Microsoft does not publish separate ranking factors for Copilot; its guidelines say only that Copilot uses the same ranking foundation.

Crawling, and the controls that separate Copilot from search

The Microsoft documents reviewed for this guide describe no separate Copilot crawler. Copilot's web results come through Bing, and Bing's crawler is Bingbot, so robots.txt cannot separate Copilot from Bing search: a block on Bingbot applies to both. Bing lists "Blocking Bingbot in your robots.txt file" (opens in a new tab) among practices to avoid, and notes that "robots.txt controls crawl access, not indexing" (opens in a new tab). A 2025 study of eight AI search tools made the same observation from the publishers' side: of the tools whose crawlers are public, Copilot was the only one that no publisher in its dataset blocked, "likely because Copilot uses the same crawler, BingBot, as the Bing search engine" (opens in a new tab) (journalism study, March 2025).

Bing instead offers page-level directives, which go in a robots meta tag, that treat Copilot and search differently (official documentation):

The training column comes from a September 2023 announcement about Bing Chat (opens in a new tab), Bing's chat feature at the time. Bing's current guidelines describe the directives' effects on Copilot but do not restate their effects on training. They add: "To allow richer citations and answers, avoid using NOCACHE on content intended for Copilot or grounding experiences." (opens in a new tab)

Web search can be switched off at work

In the work versions, IT admins decide whether Copilot may search the web at all (official documentation):

• A policy lets admins turn web search on or off for users or groups (opens in a new tab). If they turn it off, users cannot turn it back on.
• If admins leave the policy unset, web search is available unless a broader policy on "optional connected experiences" is disabled (opens in a new tab).
• For U.S. government cloud customers (GCC and DoD), web search is available but turned off by default (opens in a new tab).
• Users can turn off a Web content toggle, and then web content isn't included in Copilot responses (opens in a new tab).

Where web search is off, Copilot answers without public web pages, and no page can be cited.

How Bing finds and refreshes pages

Bing asks site owners to make URLs discoverable through "IndexNow URL submission," "XML sitemaps," "Crawlable internal links," and "External links from relevant websites" (opens in a new tab). On the first two (official documentation unless marked):

• Sitemaps should list only canonical URLs and include freshness signals such as lastmod, and Bing says sitemaps "do not guarantee visibility" (opens in a new tab).
• IndexNow should be used when URLs are added, content is updated, or URLs are removed; Bing says timely notifications "reduce outdated or incorrect URL references in Copilot responses and grounding results," and it prefers streaming submissions to batches (opens in a new tab).
• An IndexNow submission is shared with Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep, and Amazon, but not Google, and "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing" (opens in a new tab) (protocol documentation).
• In 2023, Bing said 12% of new URLs clicked in its results were first discovered through IndexNow (opens in a new tab) (platform statement).

How Copilot reads a page

Bing's guidelines and Microsoft's advertising team describe what makes a page usable for grounding (official guidance):

• Rendered text. Bing warns against "Hiding critical content behind client-side rendering" (opens in a new tab) and says "Content that cannot be reliably rendered may not be indexed or selected for grounding results." (opens in a new tab)
• Pieces, not whole pages. Microsoft says assistants like Copilot parse pages into "smaller, structured pieces that can be evaluated for authority and relevance" (opens in a new tab), and advises against hiding answers in tabs or expandable menus, or keeping core information only in PDFs or images (opens in a new tab).
• Facts that stand alone. Bing says "URLs are more likely to be selected for grounding queries and citations when content stands on its own" (opens in a new tab), with facts stated explicitly and important information visible on the URL itself.
• One topic, answer first. Bing says "URLs focused on a primary topic are more likely to be selected for grounding results" (opens in a new tab) and asks site owners to place essential information near the top (opens in a new tab).
• Consistent names. Bing asks for "clear and consistent naming for people, organizations, products, and locations" (opens in a new tab).
• Current facts. Bing asks site owners to "Update content when facts or guidance change." (opens in a new tab)
• Structured data. Bing says it "may support clearer grounding but does not guarantee visibility or grounding traffic" (opens in a new tab), and that markup must match the visible content.

What Microsoft reports to site owners

Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, that shows how content appears "across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations" (opens in a new tab). Its measures (official documentation):

None of the measures counts clicks. Bing says Citation Share does not "expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content" (opens in a new tab). In March 2026, Microsoft added a view that maps each grounding query to the pages cited for it, and each page to its grounding queries (opens in a new tab). Bing's guidelines add that content "may appear as impressions, citations, or grounding references in Copilot responses" (opens in a new tab) and that "A decline in clicks does not always indicate a loss of visibility." (opens in a new tab)

What research shows about Copilot

Few studies test Copilot directly, and most use news questions. These findings include it:

• Short answers, few links. In a study by 22 public broadcasters of the free consumer assistants (late May to early June 2025), Copilot "tended to provide shorter answers with fewer links to sources." 37% of its answers had a significant issue and 15% a significant sourcing issue, and its 23% rate of significant context issues was the worst of the four assistants (opens in a new tab) (675 Copilot answers). In one answer about the 2026 World Cup, Copilot used only FIFA's own sources (opens in a new tab), so an organization's own pages can be the whole source set.
• Declining to answer. Asked to identify the source of news excerpts, Copilot declined more questions than it answered, while the other seven tools were more likely to give a wrong answer than to acknowledge their limits (opens in a new tab) (1,600 queries; March 2025).
• Less-visited sites get cited. In an audit of Copilot Search in Bing, the median popularity rank of the domains Copilot cited was 3,912, against 2,412 for Bing's own first-page results and 746 for Google's (opens in a new tab), where a lower rank means more traffic (preprint; July–August 2025). For a given query, Copilot's citations included on average about 8% of the domains on Bing's first page for that query (opens in a new tab). Ranking on Bing's first page for the words a user typed is therefore a weak predictor on its own.
• Younger pages. In a vendor study of about 17 million cited URLs, Copilot's citations averaged 1,056 days since publication, against 1,416 days for Google's organic results (opens in a new tab) (July 2025).
• Manipulation worked in 2024. In tests run in 2024, hidden instructions on a product page made a fictitious camera 2.5 times more likely to be recommended by Bing Copilot than a comparable fictitious camera, and raised its recommendation rate against real Nikon and Fujifilm cameras from 34.0% to 59.4% (opens in a new tab) (peer-reviewed). Instructions placed on third-party pages succeeded at most 25% of the time on Bing, against 95% to 100% on the attacker's own page (opens in a new tab). Bing now lists "Prompt Injection and AI Manipulation" (opens in a new tab) as abuse.

How much traffic Copilot sends

• Share of referrals. In a mostly B2B referral panel, Copilot's share of AI referrals was 3.2% in May to August 2025 and 4.0% in March to April 2026 (opens in a new tab) (vendor panel).
• Crawling per visit. In July 2025, Microsoft made about 41 page requests for each visit it referred, against 1,091 for OpenAI and 38,065 for Anthropic (opens in a new tab) (network measurement). Cloudflare notes that Google and Microsoft "rely on unified crawlers" (opens in a new tab) rather than separate bots for each purpose.
• Missing referrers. In a small test in early 2025, visits from links in Copilot were recorded as "Direct" in a vendor's analytics (opens in a new tab) (vendor test). GA4's AI Assistant channel names Copilot (opens in a new tab), and Microsoft Clarity counts visits from copilot.microsoft.com but not from AI features embedded in other products, such as office tools (opens in a new tab).
• Conversion. Across 1,277 publisher and news sites, Microsoft Clarity reported that referrals from Copilot had the highest subscription conversion rate of the AI sources it measured (opens in a new tab) (one month of conversion data; Microsoft owns Copilot; not B2B).
• Use. 17% of U.S. adults said they ever use Copilot (opens in a new tab) (survey, February 2026). Among U.S. B2B professionals who use AI at work, 53% use Copilot for work and 45% for product research (opens in a new tab) (vendor survey; 519 respondents; March–April 2026).

Steps

Steps 1 to 5 follow Microsoft's documentation. Steps 6 to 10 are AEO HQ's recommendations based on the evidence above.

1. Let Bingbot crawl the pages you want cited. Check robots.txt and any bot rules at your host or CDN, since Bing lists blocking Bingbot among practices to avoid (opens in a new tab). Confirm in server logs that Bingbot requests receive HTTP 200.
2. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit an XML sitemap. List canonical URLs only, with lastmod values that match real changes (opens in a new tab).
3. Send IndexNow notifications as pages change. Send each change when it happens rather than in batches, as Bing's guidelines ask (opens in a new tab).
4. Check the robots meta tags on pages you want cited. Remove NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOCACHE, and NOSNIPPET from them. Use NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE only where you want Copilot kept out or limited.
5. Put key facts in server-rendered HTML, near the top, in sentences that stand on their own. Prices, scope, dates, and definitions should not live only in tabs, PDFs, images, or scripts.
6. Find the searches Copilot runs for your buyers' questions. Ask Copilot Chat the questions your buyers ask and record the web search queries it shows (opens in a new tab).
7. Rank in Bing for those short queries. Copilot uses the top web search results (opens in a new tab) for the queries it generates, which are not the words the buyer typed. Give each distinct question a page or section that answers it, and check your position in Bing for each generated query. Ranking for the typed question alone is not enough: the audit above found Copilot citing only a small part of Bing's first page for the same query.
8. Use one name and one set of facts everywhere. Keep the company and product names, the description, and the prices identical on your site and on the profiles and directories you control.
9. Earn links and coverage from relevant sites. Bing counts external links from relevant websites as a discovery signal (opens in a new tab) and asks what kinds of sites link to you when it judges reputation (opens in a new tab). It treats link buying and "artificial social promotion schemes that simulate popularity" (opens in a new tab) as abuse. See brand mentions and AI recommendations.
10. Measure. Use the AI Performance report for citations and grounding queries, GA4 or Clarity for referrals, and a fixed set of buyer questions asked several times over several weeks, in the Copilot version your buyers use. Methods are covered in how to measure AI visibility and how to track AI referral traffic in GA4.

Bing work carries over to another assistant: OpenAI names Microsoft among ChatGPT search's providers (opens in a new tab), so the same indexing supports ranking in ChatGPT search. Google's assistants are a separate job; see how to rank in Gemini.

What the evidence shows and does not show

Antipatterns

An antipattern is a practice that looks helpful but fails or backfires.

1. Blocking Bingbot to keep content out of Copilot. It also cuts off Bing search, and robots.txt "controls crawl access, not indexing" (opens in a new tab). Instead, use NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE on the pages concerned.
2. Leaving NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE on pages you want cited. Sites often set these for other reasons; Bing noted in 2023 that many paywall sites use only the NOARCHIVE tag (opens in a new tab). Instead, audit the robots meta tags on key pages.
3. Treating Copilot as separate from Bing SEO. Copilot relies on the same foundation as Bing search (opens in a new tab). Instead, fix Bing crawling and indexing first.
4. Answers in tabs, PDFs, images, or client-side scripts. Content that cannot be reliably rendered may not be indexed or selected for grounding (opens in a new tab). Instead, put answers in server-rendered HTML.
5. Mass-produced pages. Bing says large-scale content generated without oversight or editorial review "may be excluded from indexing" (opens in a new tab). Instead, publish one reviewed page per question, with real facts.
6. Hidden instructions for AI. They worked in 2024 tests (opens in a new tab), and Bing says such content "may result in reduced visibility or removal from search experiences" (opens in a new tab). Instead, state facts plainly.
7. Buying links or fake popularity. Bing's guidelines name link buying and artificial social promotion (opens in a new tab) as abuse. Instead, earn coverage.
8. Judging by referrals alone. Some Copilot visits register as Direct (opens in a new tab), and clicks can fall while visibility holds (opens in a new tab). Instead, combine the AI Performance report, analytics, and repeated tests.
9. Testing only in your own work account. Admins can turn web search off (opens in a new tab), and the work versions also draw on internal files. Instead, test in the versions and settings your buyers use.

Checklist

FAQ

Does Microsoft Copilot use Bing or Google?

Bing. Microsoft says Copilot "generates a search query that it sends to the Bing search service" (opens in a new tab), and Bing says Copilot relies on the same crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as Bing search (opens in a new tab).

Is there a Copilot crawler I can allow or block?

None is described in the Microsoft documentation reviewed for this guide. Copilot's web results come from Bing's index, which Bingbot builds. To limit how Copilot uses a page while keeping it in Bing search, use NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE (opens in a new tab).

How do I keep my content out of Copilot but stay in Bing search?

Add NOARCHIVE to the page's robots meta tag. It "prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results" (opens in a new tab), and pages tagged NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE still appear in Bing's search results (opens in a new tab). NOCACHE is the middle option: Copilot may still cite the page, but only its URL, title, and snippet (opens in a new tab).

How can I see whether Copilot cites my pages?

Use the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. It shows citations, cited pages, and grounding queries across Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries, and select partner integrations (opens in a new tab). It does not show clicks.

Does Bing indexing help with other assistants?

With ChatGPT, it can: OpenAI names Microsoft among ChatGPT search's providers (opens in a new tab). Microsoft also says its grounding "powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market" (opens in a new tab) but does not say which ones (company statement). Google's AI features are covered in how to rank in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Does schema markup help Copilot?

Bing says structured data "may support clearer grounding but does not guarantee visibility or grounding traffic" (opens in a new tab), and that it must match the visible content. No study has measured its effect on Copilot citations.

How long until Copilot cites a new page?

No study has measured it. IndexNow tells Bing about a change quickly, but a submission "does not guarantee immediate indexing" (opens in a new tab).

Change log

• September 28, 2026: First published.

Next steps

To check whether AI crawlers can reach your pages and how AI assistants answer your buyers' questions, AEO HQ's Instant AEO Audit ($499) is an automated audit of your site and up to three competitors. It includes a live crawl of your key pages and checks of AI crawler access, schema, and llms.txt.