Is there a Copilot-specific crawler to allow?

Copilot grounds in the Bing index rather than crawling separately, so the practical lever is ordinary Bing crawlability. Make sure Bingbot is not blocked in robots.txt or challenged by your firewall, and treat Bing indexation as the prerequisite for appearing in Copilot answers.

How do I see whether Copilot has cited my site?

Open AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. Introduced in public preview in February 2026, it reports total citations, average cited pages per day, and the grounding queries behind them across Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. It is free and it is first-party data.

Does IndexNow help with AI answers specifically?

Indirectly but meaningfully. IndexNow speeds up discovery of changed URLs in Bing's index, and Copilot answers from that index, so a page that gets indexed sooner becomes eligible to be grounded against sooner. It does not influence whether a page is chosen.

Can I hide part of a page from AI answers without hurting rankings?

Bing supports the data-nosnippet attribute for exactly that. It lets you exclude specific sections — paywalled, promotional or experimental content — from Search and AI answers while leaving the page's visibility and ranking intact, which a robots disallow would not.

Microsoft Copilot SEO

Microsoft Copilot SEO is Bing SEO with one unusual advantage. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing's index, so the work of being cited is the work of being indexed well — and Bing, alone among the major engines, now reports your AI citations back to you.

That last point changes what is worth doing. Everywhere else in this category, whether an engine quoted you is unobservable without repeated live prompting. On Bing it is a free report, which makes Copilot the one surface where you can close the loop between a change and its effect.

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Bing Webmaster Tools now reports AI citations

In February 2026 Microsoft introduced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, a public preview that shows how often your content is cited as a source across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. Microsoft describes it as an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization tooling.

It reports three things, and Microsoft is candid about the limits of each. The data is a sample of overall citation activity, and it deliberately does not indicate placement, ranking, authority, or the role any page played inside a particular answer.

Metric	What it shows	What it does not show
Total Citations	How often your content appeared as a source in AI answers in the period.	Where in the answer, or how prominently.
Average Cited Pages	Unique pages from your site cited per day, averaged over the range.	Ranking, authority, or a page's role in any single answer.
Grounding queries	The key phrases the AI used when retrieving your cited content.	Complete coverage — the figures are a sample.

Getting into the index, and getting in faster

Because Copilot answers from Bing, indexation is the whole foundation. A page Bing has not crawled cannot be grounded against, no matter how well it is written.

IndexNow is the fastest route in. It is a simple, free protocol supported by Bing and Yandex that tells an engine a URL has changed, instead of waiting for a crawl to notice. Publishing a key file and submitting changed URLs turns discovery from days into minutes, which matters most for a new site with no crawl history.

Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools — importing from Google Search Console is the quickest path.
Submit your sitemap, then confirm the indexed count rather than assuming it.
Publish an IndexNow key file and submit URLs whenever they genuinely change.
Open AI Performance and read the grounding queries — they tell you which questions your content is actually being retrieved for.

What to change on the page

Copilot rewards the same structural qualities as every other answer engine, so nothing here is wasted if you also care about ChatGPT or Gemini.

Bing has also shipped support for the data-nosnippet attribute, which lets you exclude specific passages — paywalled or promotional text, for instance — from Search and AI answers without affecting the page's visibility or ranking. It is a scalpel rather than the blunt instrument of blocking a crawler.

Open each section with a sentence that answers its own heading in under thirty words.
Declare what the page is with structured data, not only who published it.
Use lists and tables for enumerable facts — they are the easiest structures to quote.
Show publication and review dates so freshness can be judged.
Cite primary sources, which is what makes a claim checkable rather than asserted.

The honest limit

AI Performance is the closest thing in this category to a real citation report, and it is still a sample covering Microsoft's own surfaces. It tells you nothing about ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, each of which grounds in a different index.

What Maveriko measures is the input side: whether crawlers can reach the page, whether the markup declares its subject, whether the prose is shaped to be lifted. Pair that with Bing's report and you have both halves on one engine, which is more than any other surface currently offers.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Copilot-specific crawler to allow?: Copilot grounds in the Bing index rather than crawling separately, so the practical lever is ordinary Bing crawlability. Make sure Bingbot is not blocked in robots.txt or challenged by your firewall, and treat Bing indexation as the prerequisite for appearing in Copilot answers.
How do I see whether Copilot has cited my site?: Open AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. Introduced in public preview in February 2026, it reports total citations, average cited pages per day, and the grounding queries behind them across Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. It is free and it is first-party data.
Does IndexNow help with AI answers specifically?: Indirectly but meaningfully. IndexNow speeds up discovery of changed URLs in Bing's index, and Copilot answers from that index, so a page that gets indexed sooner becomes eligible to be grounded against sooner. It does not influence whether a page is chosen.
Can I hide part of a page from AI answers without hurting rankings?: Bing supports the data-nosnippet attribute for exactly that. It lets you exclude specific sections — paywalled, promotional or experimental content — from Search and AI answers while leaving the page's visibility and ranking intact, which a robots disallow would not.

Sources

Last reviewed 7 Sept 2026.

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