Bing Webmaster Tools Now Tracks AI Citation Performance
▼ Summary
– Microsoft has launched a public preview of an AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools to show how content is cited in AI-generated answers.
– The dashboard provides four core metrics: total citations, average cited pages, page-level citation activity, and the “grounding queries” that triggered the citations.
– This is the first time Bing Webmaster Tools offers visibility into citation frequency, specific referenced URLs, and trends over time for generative AI answers.
– The feature provides more detailed citation data than Google’s Search Console, which lacks a dedicated AI report and URL-level citation counts.
– Microsoft will continue refining the AI Performance metrics and has been consolidating and enhancing its webmaster tools over time.
Understanding how your content performs within AI-driven search environments is now clearer than ever. Microsoft has rolled out a new AI Performance dashboard within Bing Webmaster Tools, providing direct insight into how your webpages are sourced by generative AI features. This public preview tool tracks when your content is cited by Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and select partner integrations, moving beyond traditional search metrics to measure influence in AI-generated answers.
The dashboard presents four essential metrics for webmasters and content creators. Total citations measures the frequency your site’s content appears as a source in AI answers over a chosen timeframe. Average cited pages reveals the daily average of unique URLs from your domain that are referenced. Perhaps most valuable is the page-level citation activity, which details exactly which specific URLs on your site are being cited most often, allowing you to track performance trends for individual pages. Additionally, the feature introduces “grounding queries,” showing the key phrases and questions the AI used when it retrieved your content to formulate its answers. Microsoft clarifies that this query data is a representative sample. A visual timeline further helps users observe how these citation patterns evolve.
This development marks a significant step in SEO analytics. For the first time, Bing Webmaster Tools offers a transparent view into content citation within generative AI, detailing which pages are referenced and how that activity fluctuates. While Google incorporates data from its AI Overviews into the broader Search Console Performance report, it does not provide a dedicated, granular report tracking citation counts for specific URLs. Bing’s dashboard provides a more detailed picture, tracking cited pages, citation frequency, and the triggering queries, offering actionable data to inform content strategy.
The AI Performance feature is currently available in public preview. Microsoft has indicated it will continue to refine these metrics as more data becomes available. This update is part of a broader evolution for Bing’s webmaster platform, which has previously merged web search and chat metrics and introduced various comparison and content control tools.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
