How to get cited by Microsoft Copilot: a guide for B2B SaaS
Microsoft Copilot cites a page when it grounds an answer in web search, and the search behind it is Bing. Microsoft's transparency note says Copilot draws on web search results when people are looking for information, with links to the pages it used, and its documentation for the work version describes Copilot sending a short query, written from the user's prompt, to the Bing search service. So a page has to be in Bing's index and rank for those short queries before Copilot can cite it. For a B2B SaaS team that means four jobs: let Bingbot crawl the pages buyers ask about and keep them free of the meta tags that withhold content from Copilot's answers, tell Bing when those pages change through IndexNow, state the facts in plain HTML text, and read Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, which counts how often Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages and for which grounding queries.
Copilot is not one of the seven engines The Rank Master's programme measures. We cover it here because Microsoft builds it into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, so a buyer can ask it about vendors without opening a browser, and because the Bing report that counts Copilot citations also counts those in AI-generated summaries in Bing and in select partner integrations. The seven we do measure are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Book a 30-minute call to talk about them for your category.
Which Copilot is your buyer using?
"Copilot" names several products, and they reach the web under different rules. Microsoft renamed Bing Chat to Copilot in November 2023 (Microsoft), and it has since renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat (Microsoft Learn, updated 18 August 2026). The names now overlap, so it helps to separate them by who signs in.
| Version | Who uses it | How it reaches the web | Who can switch web search off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Copilot for individuals | People signed in with a personal Microsoft account | Grounded in web search results for information-seeking conversations, with hyperlinked citations below the answer | Not described in the transparency note we read |
| Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat (formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) | People signed in with a work account in an organisation's Microsoft 365 tenant | Sends generated queries to the Bing search service when web content would improve the answer | The organisation's IT admins by policy; eligible users of either product through the Web content toggle, which Microsoft's Learn article says is now available in both |
| AI summaries in Bing and partner integrations | Bing searchers, and users of the select partner integrations Bing mentions | Counted alongside Copilot in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report | Not applicable |
The sources for the first two rows are Microsoft's transparency note for Copilot for individuals (18 August 2026) and its Learn article on web search in Microsoft Copilot; the third comes from Bing's announcement of the AI Performance report, which covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.
For a B2B vendor the work version matters most, and two details in Microsoft's documentation shape it. Web search there is a policy setting: IT admins can turn it on or off for the tenant with the "Allow web search in Copilot" policy, and if they leave the policy unconfigured, web search is available unless they have disabled optional connected experiences. US government tenants on GCC and DoD start with it off. And a work answer can mix sources: Microsoft's own example shows a response split into a section from the company's data and a section from the web, so your public pages may sit next to the buyer's internal notes about you.
How Copilot turns a question into Bing queries
Microsoft's Learn article is unusually specific. Copilot reads the prompt, picks out the parts where web information would help, and writes a search query of its own: a short phrase based on the prompt rather than the full prompt, except when the prompt is itself very short. Whole documents and identifying details about the user are left out. Copilot then composes its answer from what Bing returns.
Two consequences follow for a software company. You compete for short, plain queries, so a buyer who asks Copilot to compare the expense tools on their shortlist might set off searches as simple as "[vendor] pricing" or "[vendor] integrations"; the pages that rank at the top in Bing for each of those are the ones Copilot reads. And the consumer product works from the top of those results: the transparency note says Copilot writes its summaries from the top web results and builds its response around content that ranks well. Ranking in Bing is therefore not a side issue for Copilot; it is the entry ticket.
Microsoft's advertising blog states the dependency outright, naming Microsoft Copilot among the experiences that run on Bing's search index (8 October 2025). On 2 June 2026 Microsoft also announced Web IQ: grounding APIs for AI systems and agents, built on the Bing index, that return passages and structured evidence rather than whole documents. Our ChatGPT guide explains why checking your key pages in Bing is also a cheap precaution for ChatGPT search.
What the index rewards is set out in Microsoft's May 2026 post on the evolving role of the index. Grounding uses the same crawlers and quality signals as search, but the unit it values is a discrete fact with clear provenance rather than a whole page. A grounding system may decline to answer when the evidence is missing, stale or contradictory, and Microsoft calls out stale facts as a direct cause of wrong answers. For a SaaS company the practical reading is consistency: if your pricing page, your comparison page and your review-site listing give three different prices, you have handed Copilot a conflict instead of an answer.
The controls that keep a page in or out of Copilot
None of the Microsoft pages we read describes a crawler token for Copilot; the controls run through Bing. Bing's AI Performance announcement says Bing respects content owners' preferences expressed in robots.txt and its other supported mechanisms, and the Web IQ announcement makes the same commitment for robots exclusion protocols and publisher controls.
| Control | Effect on Copilot answers | Effect on Bing results |
|---|---|---|
| robots.txt rules for Bingbot | Bing says it respects robots.txt preferences in its AI experiences | The usual crawl rules apply |
| NOCACHE in the robots meta tag | The page may still be used, but only its URL, title and snippet are shown | No cached copy is kept; Bing's 2023 post said the page stays in results |
| NOARCHIVE in the robots meta tag | Copilot does not link to the page | No cached copy is kept; Bing's 2023 post said the page stays in results |
| Both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE | Treated as NOCACHE | As for NOCACHE |
| "Allow web search in Copilot" policy (work tenants) | Turns web search on or off for a tenant's users or groups | Not affected |
| Web content toggle (users of Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat) | Lets a user leave web content out of their own responses | Not affected |
The meta tag rows follow Bing's current robots meta tag documentation, read on 17 October 2026, which adds that each tag can also be sent as an X-Robots-Tag response header and that naming bingbot in place of robots limits a tag to Bing. The same page ties the tags to training: Bing does not use noindex or noarchive content to train Microsoft's generative AI foundation models, and uses only the URL, title and snippet of nocache content. Bing first set out these rules in a September 2023 announcement, written when the product was still Bing Chat; that post said NOARCHIVE pages would be left out of the chat answers altogether, where the current page says only that Copilot will not link them. The policy and toggle rows come from Microsoft's Learn article.
The trap for a SaaS site is NOARCHIVE. Bing's 2023 post noted that many paywalled sites already used it, and a tag set once in a template reaches every page built from it. On a pricing or comparison page it means Copilot will not link to you. Bing's 2023 post added that such pages still appear in Bing's results, so nothing in your search reports looks wrong. Look for it in the page source and the response headers of every page you want cited.
To confirm that a visitor calling itself Bingbot is genuine, compare its address with the ranges Bing publishes in bingbot.json; the copy we read was created on 3 January 2024.
IndexNow: telling Bing when a page changes
Copilot can only cite the version of a page that Bing holds, which makes freshness part of the job. Bing's AI Performance announcement recommends IndexNow, a protocol that tells participating search engines each time a page is added, changed or deleted, so that AI systems work from its current version. The details, from indexnow.org (read 17 October 2026):
- One ping reaches every participant. A submission sent to any participating endpoint is shared with all IndexNow-enabled engines. The engines listed on indexnow.org are Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, with endpoints for Amazon and the Internet Archive as well. Google is not on the list.
- Set-up is a key file. You create a key of 8 to 128 characters, host it as a text file at the root of the site (or elsewhere, named in the submission), and send URLs with the key. Many platforms do this for you: indexnow.org lists native support or plugins for WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Drupal and others, and says Cloudflare offers a native integration.
- Batches and pacing. A single POST can carry up to 10,000 URLs. The first submission may return HTTP 202 while the key is verified, and the FAQ asks for a gap of at least 5 minutes before the same URL is sent again.
- A signal, not a guarantee. A submission does not mean the page is indexed at once; the search engine still decides whether to crawl it, and each submitted URL counts toward the site's crawl quota. Keep your XML sitemap as well: the FAQ recommends using both.
Price and availability changes are among the cases indexnow.org lists for a notification. For a SaaS company that translates into a simple rule: whenever pricing, plan limits, an integration page or a comparison page changes, send the URL.
How Copilot shows its sources
For individuals. The transparency note says that when a text response is grounded in web data, hyperlinked citations are listed below it, so the reader can open the sites used; in voice mode, the citations appear in the conversation transcript. Microsoft adds a caution of its own: Copilot can misstate what a source says even when the source carries high authority, and Microsoft encourages users to check facts before acting on them.
At work. Copilot Chat goes further and shows its working. Its linked citation section includes web search query citations: the exact queries Copilot sent to Bing for that response. Microsoft limits this in two ways. Only Copilot Chat shows the query citations, not the Copilot pane inside apps such as Word or PowerPoint, and they stay in the chat thread for only 24 hours.
That second view is the most useful research tool Copilot offers a vendor. Ask Copilot Chat a buying question with web search on, open the citations, and you can see the actual Bing queries behind the answer. Search those queries in Bing yourself and you will see the kind of pages Copilot had to choose from, and whether yours ranks among them.
What Microsoft says about page structure
Microsoft's guidance for appearing in AI answers, published on its advertising blog in October 2025, describes Copilot splitting a page into parts, weighing each part for authority and relevance, and building answers from them (Microsoft Advertising). Its practical advice, in short:
- Keep key answers visible. Do not hide them in tabs or expandable menus, which AI systems may not render. Do not rely on PDFs for core information, and do not put key facts only in images.
- Align the title, H1 and meta description, so that all three describe the same thing.
- Use lists and tables for comparisons and steps, and write concise, self-contained sentences that make sense when lifted out of the page.
- Tie claims to facts you can measure. A word like "seamless" gives a system nothing to classify; a stated limit or price does.
The February 2026 AI Performance announcement adds clear headings, tables and FAQ sections, evidence for claims and regular updates. This is Microsoft's advice for its own systems. Google's guidance for its AI features differs in places: it says content needs no chunking and no special schema markup. That is one reason we write for readers first and check each engine's documentation; AEO vs SEO: what actually changes explains why answer engines reward clear, specific statements.
Measuring Copilot citations in Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report in public preview in February 2026, then extended it in June and October. It is the only first-party report we know of that counts citations in Copilot.
| Release | What it added | What to use it for |
|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | Total citations; average cited pages per day; grounding queries (a sample of the phrases the AI used to retrieve your content); citation counts per page; trends over time | Which of your pages Copilot and Bing's AI answers already cite, and for what |
| June 2026 | Intents (grounding queries classed as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Research and other types); Topics; Citation Share; Compare | Filtering to commercial questions, and tracking your share of the citations for a query |
| October 2026 | Topics Portfolio (beta): topic size, sites cited and query counts for each topic, plus opportunity queries where other sites are cited and yours is not | Finding buying questions where competitors are cited and you are absent |
Sources: Bing's announcements of AI Performance (10 February 2026), the June additions (16 June 2026) and Topics Portfolio (13 October 2026).
Read the numbers with Microsoft's own caveats. Citation Share is the percentage of all citations shown for a grounding query that went to your site; Microsoft calls it observational, and says it does not reveal competitors' domains or represent a share of traffic. Total citations show how often you were referenced, not where you appeared in an answer. Topics Portfolio's classification is AI-generated, its sizes are approximate, opportunity volumes are shown only as ranges, branded queries can turn up as opportunities, and sites without enough data may not see the tab at all; it offers one-, two- or three-month windows. None of the three announcements lists clicks or traffic among the metrics, so pair the report with your own analytics.
Step by step: getting a B2B SaaS product cited by Copilot
Step 1: Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools
Add and verify the site, submit your sitemap, and check that pricing, comparison, integration and product pages are indexed. Read robots.txt for rules that block Bingbot, check that your bot protection lets genuine Bingbot traffic through, and confirm visits against bingbot.json.
Step 2: Remove the tags that withhold content
Search the source and the response headers of every page you want cited for NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE, whether in a robots or bingbot meta tag, in a template, or in an X-Robots-Tag header, and remove any that have no reason to be there.
Step 3: Set up IndexNow
Turn on your CMS or CDN integration, or host a key file and submit URLs yourself. Wire the submission into the moments that matter: a price change, a new plan, a new integration, an updated comparison.
Step 4: Put the facts where Copilot can read them
State prices, plan limits and integrations in visible HTML text, use tables for comparisons, and keep the facts identical across your pricing page, comparison pages and review-site listings. Our guide to SaaS alternatives and comparison pages covers the page types that carry most buying questions.
Step 5: Read the queries behind real answers
In Copilot Chat with web search on, ask ten to twenty buying questions from real sales conversations and open the citations within 24 hours to note the exact Bing queries. Search each query in Bing, see which pages rank, and fix the gaps where yours is missing.
Step 6: Review the AI Performance report every month
Filter grounding queries to commercial intent, watch Citation Share for your most important queries, and work through Topics Portfolio's opportunity queries, starting with those where review sites or roundups are cited instead of you.
How this guide was researched
Every statement about Copilot and Bing comes from Microsoft's own pages, read on 17 October 2026: the transparency note for Copilot for individuals (18 August 2026); the Learn article on web search in Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat (updated 18 August 2026); Bing's posts announcing AI Performance (February 2026), on the role of the index (6 May 2026), on Web IQ (2 June 2026), on the June report additions (16 June 2026) and on Topics Portfolio (13 October 2026); the September 2023 post on NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE and Bing's current help page on the robots meta tags it supports, read in a browser; Microsoft Advertising's content guidance (8 October 2025); Microsoft's November 2023 announcement renaming Bing Chat; and Bing's published bingbot.json. The IndexNow details come from indexnow.org's FAQ and its list of participating engines, and the comparison with Google from Google's AI optimization guide (updated 10 July 2026), read the same day. Microsoft does not publish how Copilot chooses between the pages Bing returns, beyond its emphasis on high-ranking content, so this guide does not guess at a ranking formula.
Questions SaaS teams ask about Copilot citations
Does Microsoft Copilot use Bing?
Yes. Microsoft's documentation for the work version says Copilot sends generated queries to the Bing search service, and Microsoft names Copilot among the experiences that run on Bing's search index.
Is there a Copilot crawler to allow in robots.txt?
None of the Microsoft pages we read describes one. Access runs through Bing: Bing says it respects robots.txt and its other supported controls, and its robots meta tag documentation gives NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE specific effects in Copilot.
Can I see which searches Copilot ran for an answer?
In Copilot Chat at work, yes: the citation section lists the exact queries sent to Bing, for 24 hours. The Copilot pane inside Word or PowerPoint does not show them.
Does IndexNow help with Google?
Not directly. Google is not among the participating engines listed on indexnow.org, so keep your sitemaps and Search Console in order for Google.
Can a page stay in Bing's results without being linked in Copilot?
Yes. Bing's current robots meta tag documentation says that with NOARCHIVE the page is not linked in Copilot, while taking a page out of the index is the job of noindex. Bing's 2023 announcement said NOARCHIVE pages would also be left out of the chat answers but would still appear in search results.
For the seven engines named above, The Rank Master runs the work on published plans from $2,000 a month, each with a set monthly number of revenue pages (4, 8 or 14) and earned citations (2, 4 or 7), and custom programmes start at $1,500. The first 90 days are the initial term; after that it is month-to-month on 30 days' notice, and your pages, briefs, data and contacts stay yours. Book a 30-minute call.