Microsoft announced something this week that we have been waiting for: AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. For the first time, website owners can see how their content is cited in AI-generated answers: in Copilot, in Bing’s AI summaries, and in selected partner integrations.
That is big news. And we are happy to explain why.
The blind spot of AI visibility
The way people find information is changing fundamentally. More and more often, users get their answer not through a list of blue links, but through an AI-generated response that synthesises information from multiple sources. The question is no longer just “are we on page 1?” but also: “are we cited as a source when AI gives an answer?”
Until now, that was largely a blind spot. You could see exactly how many clicks and impressions you got in classic search results via Google Search Console, but AI answers? Silence.
What does Bing now show?
The new AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools shows four metrics:
- Total Citations: how often your content is displayed as a source in AI answers.
- Average Cited Pages: how many unique pages from your site are cited on average per day.
- Grounding Queries: the queries the AI used to retrieve your content. This is perhaps the most valuable metric: it shows which questions the AI associates with your brand.
- Page-level Citation Activity: which specific URLs are cited most often.
There is also a timeline that makes trends in citation activity visible.
Prompts vs. grounding queries
The distinction between prompts and grounding queries is important to understand. A prompt is what a user types into an AI tool - for example: “Which agency in the Netherlands has experience with B2B lead generation?” A grounding query is what the AI system then generates internally to retrieve relevant sources. The AI model translates the prompt into one or more search queries that it sends to an index (such as Bing). These can be phrased very differently from what the user literally asked. Shorter, more specific, or split into multiple queries.
The sequence is: user types prompt - AI generates grounding queries - search index returns sources - AI cites those sources in the answer.
That is what makes Bing’s grounding queries metric so valuable: you can see how the AI internally links your brand to certain search terms. Something that as a website owner you normally have no visibility into.
What we were already doing with Peec
We have long been working with tools such as Peec to monitor AI visibility. The approach there is different: you compile a set of prompts yourself - questions you expect your target audience to ask AI - and then track whether your brand or website is mentioned in the answers. You simulate the first step in that process: the prompt.
That is valuable. It gives you a picture of how visible you are for the questions you consider important, and you can do it cross-platform: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot. All in one overview.
But there is a fundamental limitation: you only measure what you think of yourself. The prompts in your monitoring are your best estimate of what users ask, but they remain assumptions. You do not know what you are missing.
Why Bing’s approach is complementary
And that is exactly where the power of what Bing now offers lies. These are not simulated checks. This is real data from the platform itself. And it shows the second step: the grounding queries. You do not just see whether your content is being cited, but for which internal search terms the AI selects your site as a source. That is something you cannot reverse-engineer from the outside.
The ideal approach is therefore to combine both: use Bing’s data to discover queries you would not have thought of yourself, and feed those insights back into your cross-platform monitoring via Peec.
One caveat
This of course only concerns the Microsoft ecosystem: Copilot and Bing. This dashboard tells you nothing about how your brand performs in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews. That is an important limitation, as Bing’s search share in the Netherlands is around 5 to 6 percent - modest compared to Google.
Our wish list
And that brings us to our wish list. Because if Bing can do this, we would love to see the same from:
Google Search Console. Google is experimenting heavily with AI Overviews. Webmasters deserve insight into how their content is used within them. The data exists - it is now a matter of transparency. Google, you have always led the way with Search Console. Let that apply to the AI era too.
OpenAI / ChatGPT. ChatGPT has become the first place many consumers go to ask questions. A kind of “publisher portal” where you can see how often and for which questions your content is cited would be enormously valuable. SearchGPT is taking steps, but genuine transparency towards content owners is still missing.
The fact that Microsoft is the first to make this kind of insight publicly available deserves credit. We hope the rest follow quickly. Because only when we can measure across the full breadth of AI platforms how our content is being used can we truly steer on it.
In the meantime: if you have not set up Bing Webmaster Tools for your website yet, now is the moment. And if you want to know how your brand currently stands in AI visibility, get in touch with us. We are happy to take a look together.