Bing Webmaster Tools made a major move to give marketers an insight into AI visibility. To date, marketers never had direct AI reporting from search engines nor AI platforms to understand how their website is cited within AI platforms.
Third parties have been creating tools to help marketers understand how their site is getting referenced within AI. For example, SEMRush introduced, and is continuing to update, its AI visibility tool. However, these are directional as they’re third party tools.
What makes this game changing is it’s coming directly from Microsoft and marketers can be confident in the data presented.
As reported by Microsoft, this data will showcase performance from
- Microsoft Copilot
- AI-generated summaries in Bing
- Select partner AI integrations
How to Access Bing AI Performance
To view this data, your site needs to be set up with Bing Webmaster Tools, which is a free tool to understand how your site is ranking on Bing (and now AI).
Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a new left hand category called “AI Performance”.
Upon clicking this, you’ll start to uncover how your website is featured across Co-pilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner AI integrations.
Diving into the AI performance dashboard, this breaks out total citations, by pages and grounded queries.
Total Citations
Total citations are the total amount a website is cited within the AI experiences. While the AI performance tool doesn’t show clicks to your website, this is a very helpful dataset to understand how frequently your site is featured.
Grounded Queries
Grounded queries are the AI prompts (i.e. keywords) that feature your website. For example, below we can see which queries are driving the most citations, giving us an understanding of our top performing content that the AI tools are drawing from.
AI Referenced Pages
Similarly, within the Pages view, we can see the total number of citations by pages. This data appears to be more robust than the queries section, which is similar to what we see across standard search reporting.
How to use this AI Performance data?
Every marketer should sign up for Bing Webmaster tools and start accessing this data and understand how your website is cited within the aforementioned AI experiences.
We would also recommend to marry this data with other sources to get a more holistic view of a websites AI visibility, such as:
- SEMRush AI Visibility
- GA4
- Within GA4 you can see referral traffic from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Co-piliot, etc.
What can we expect next in AI reporting?
Our hope is that Bing AI Performance reporting will start to report click data. However, despite this, this is a very helpful data set that’s brand new to marketers.
I know the industry will be pushing Google Search Console to roll out similar visibility. Since Microsoft rolled this out, I suspect Google will feel the pressure to keep up with the new industry standard.
Need help setting up your AI reporting?
At Rise Marketing Group, we’ve been leaning into the developments of AI and impact on search visibility. With that, we’re creating customized dashboards pulling in data from a variety of sources (Microsoft, GA4, SEMRush) to help marketers understand how their site is performing across AI tools. If you need help setting this up, contact Rise for a free consultation.
