Bing AI Performance: the first first-party report on AI citations

Short version, for the impatient: Bing now shows a verified site owner how often Copilot actually cited their pages, it is the first first-party number of its kind from any engine, and there is still no API — so the Download button is the integration.

I opened Bing Webmaster Tools for one of our own properties expecting the usual handful of impressions and found a tab I had not asked for: AI Performance. Until then, for two years, “AI visibility” had meant estimating — tools ran prompt panels, counted how often a brand appeared in the answers they happened to see, and called the result share of voice, which was useful but a sample of a black box. In February 2026 Microsoft opened that box a crack: a report inside Bing Webmaster Tools that tells a verified site owner how often Copilot actually cited their pages. It is the first first-party AI-citation data any engine has shipped, and it changes what a GEO report can honestly claim.

What the report measures

Three things, in ascending order of usefulness.

What you see	What it means	Why it matters
Total citations	Times pages from your site were used as a source in AI answers over the period	The volume signal — is the site being drawn on at all?
Average cited pages	Daily average of unique URLs from your site that got cited	The breadth signal — one hero page or a working corpus?
Grounding queries	The internal queries Copilot generated to go find sources	The intent signal — what the model was actually trying to answer

The date picker offers 7 days, 30 days, 3 months and a custom range, with history reaching back to November 2025, and the June 2026 update added intent labels, topic groupings and citation share — so the report now groups those grounding queries into themes instead of dumping a flat list on the reader.

Grounding queries are the part to read twice

Total citations is the number people screenshot. Grounding queries are the number that changes what gets written.

Here is how I read them. When someone asks Copilot a messy human question, the model does not search with that question; it reformulates, often into several tighter queries, and those are what retrieval runs on. AI Performance shows the reformulations that pulled in our pages, and the first time I scroll through the list I catch myself thinking that no keyword tool could have produced it — because it is machine-authored, the phrasing a model believes will surface an answer!

Read it as an editorial brief. Recurring grounding queries with few citations are gaps (the model is asking, the corpus is not answering well enough), while recurring queries with many citations are the topics to defend and deepen.

What it can’t tell you

Four honest limits, worth stating in any client report that quotes these numbers:

• Citations are not clicks. Does a citation mean a visit? No: the report counts references, so there is no AI click-through rate to compute, and referral traffic from assistants lives in analytics, not here.
• Microsoft surfaces only. Copilot, Bing’s AI answers and selected partner experiences. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews are all outside it.
• No API — yet. Microsoft has said API access is on the backlog with no timeline. Until then, the export button is the integration.
• Preview-grade history. The lookback starts in late 2025, so year-over-year comparisons do not exist and won’t for a while.

A weekly rhythm that actually uses it

The report rewards routine more than analysis, which is probably why it gets underused. What a working cadence looks like:

1. Check total citations against the previous period — trend, not absolute value. The absolute number depends on how much Copilot traffic the topic gets, which nobody on the team controls.
2. Check average cited pages. Rising citations on a flat page count means one asset is carrying the site; that is fragility, not a win.
3. Skim the grounding queries for new phrasings. Anything recurring that the site answers badly goes into the content plan this week, while the phrasing is current.
4. Export the CSV and append it to your own history. The dashboard’s window will roll; your record shouldn’t.

That fourth step is the one teams skip (I have skipped it myself, more than once), and it is the one that makes the other three worth anything six months from now.

Getting it out of the dashboard

Because there is no API, every honest integration today starts with the Download button. In seo·matrix we wired that path directly: the Rankings tab takes the Bing AI Performance CSV, parses it into the project history, and from then on the citation trend sits next to the position data, feeds the weekly digest, and can be alerted on like any other signal. Same data, kept in one place, on a timeline longer than the dashboard’s own.

Will the API arrive this year? I don’t know, and judging by “on the backlog with no timeline”, nobody else does either. When Microsoft ships it, that import becomes a connector and nothing else changes — which is exactly why it is worth starting the history now rather than waiting for it.

In short

• AI Performance is the first first-party AI-citation report from a search engine — provenance, not estimation.
• It gives total citations, average cited pages, and the grounding queries Copilot used to find you.
• Grounding queries are the editorial gold: machine-authored phrasings that reveal what the model was trying to answer.
• It says nothing about clicks, competitors, or anything outside Microsoft’s surfaces.
• There is no API yet; export the CSV into your own history so the record outlives the dashboard’s window.

Start the export habit this week. The dashboard has a short memory, and I’d rather ours didn’t!

Sources

• Search Engine Land, “Bing Webmaster Tools officially adds AI Performance report” — searchengineland.com/bing-webmaster-tools-ai-performance-report-468751: the February 2026 rollout, metric definitions and Microsoft’s stated use cases.
• CXL, “Tracking AI visibility with Bing Webmaster AI Performance reporting” — cxl.com/blog/bing-ai-visibility-tracking-webmaster-tools: date-range behaviour, lookback limits and the citations-are-not-clicks caveat.
• Otterly.ai, “Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report” — otterly.ai/blog/bing-webmaster-tools-ai-performance-report: grounding-query analysis and the June 2026 expansion (intent labels, topic groups, citation share).
• Related: AI visibility metrics: how to measure GEO in 2026 and AI share of voice.