Bing Webmaster AI Performance Update: Latest Insights
Bing Webmaster AI Performance Update: Latest Insights
Search performance reporting is shifting from a purely “ten blue links” mindset to a blended view that includes AI answers, summaries, and chat-style experiences. Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) has been moving faster than most here, and the recent wave of updates makes that clear: it is no longer only about ranking, it is also about being referenced.
The standout change is the AI Performance dashboard in public preview (Feb 2026), which surfaces how often your URLs are cited in AI-generated answers across Bing’s AI experiences and partner integrations. Paired with Copilot inside BWT and the newer Recommendations panel, it creates a workflow where you can measure AI visibility, diagnose why it is happening (or not), and then act with far less guesswork.
What the AI Performance update actually adds
The AI Performance report is a new layer of visibility that sits alongside the familiar search reports. The shift is simple but meaningful: instead of treating AI answers as a black box, Bing now gives site owners a way to quantify inclusion.
At a practical level, this matters because a citation inside an AI answer behaves differently from a classic result. It can drive awareness even when the user never clicks, and it can also drive highly motivated clicks when they do. Either way, being cited is a new kind of “position”.
Bing’s early testing drew criticism for missing click data, and the public preview addressed that by introducing AI clicks and AI CTR. That is a healthy sign: the feature is moving in response to what SEOs actually need to run comparisons and set priorities.
How to read the AI Performance dashboard without fooling yourself
AI Performance is not a replacement for Search Performance. It is a new category of evidence.
Expect some differences in pattern:
- Citations can spike around timely topics even when classic rankings stay stable.
- A single strong page can dominate citations across many related prompts.
- AI CTR may look “low” compared with classic web CTR, because AI answers often satisfy intent without a click.
When you review the report, focus on three questions:
- Which pages are being cited, and are they the pages you would choose?
- Which queries are “grounding” the citations, and do those match your intended audience language?
- When citations rise or fall, does the timing match content changes, indexing events, or external coverage?
A calm, disciplined reading helps. AI systems can reference content for reasons that are not identical to ranking factors. Treat citations as proof of usefulness and trust, then validate business impact with clicks, conversions, and assisted behaviour in your analytics stack.
Key metrics and what each one is good for
The dashboard’s real value is not the headline number. It is how the metrics work together, day-by-day, page-by-page.
| Metric | What it tells you | A smart way to use it |
|---|---|---|
| AI impressions | How often an AI experience displayed an answer where citations may appear | Spot seasonality and demand shifts that classic queries might not show clearly |
| AI citations | How often your URLs were referenced as sources | Identify your “citation magnets” and protect them with regular freshness updates |
| Cited pages | Which URLs are getting cited | Compare against your conversion paths and decide whether to strengthen internal linking |
| Grounding queries | The prompts or query themes that led to citations | Rewrite headings and key sections to match the phrasing people actually use |
| AI clicks | When users click through from the AI experience | Find the content that can carry commercial or lead-gen intent |
| AI CTR | Click rate from AI surfaces | Measure whether your snippet-worthy content also earns curiosity and trust |
If you only have time for one habit, review “Cited pages” weekly. It is the quickest way to see what Bing’s AI systems consider reference-worthy on your site.
The fastest way to influence AI visibility is still indexing speed
AI answers reward freshness when the topic demands it. Bing has been consistent about positioning IndexNow as the mechanism that keeps content current for both search and AI answers.
If you publish newsy content, update product availability, adjust pricing, or maintain reference material, latency matters. IndexNow pings can get pages discovered and crawled far sooner than traditional passive crawling. BWT’s IndexNow Insights add another layer by showing what was submitted, what was indexed, and where problems sit.
This is less glamorous than “AI optimisation”, yet it is often the difference between being cited and being invisible. Your content cannot be referenced if Bing does not have the latest version in its index.
After you have IndexNow working, set a simple standard: any meaningful content change should trigger a ping, and any important page that remains “not indexed” should be treated as a technical issue to resolve, not a mystery to accept.
Copilot in BWT: a real workflow tool, not a toy
Copilot inside Bing Webmaster Tools (rolled out broadly in March 2025, English-only at launch) is most useful when you stop asking generic SEO questions and start asking questions anchored to your site’s actual data.
Good prompts tend to have three traits: they reference a section of BWT, they ask for prioritisation, and they ask for a next action that can be verified.
A few practical uses, once you have looked at your AI Performance patterns:
- Summarise changes week-on-week
- Flag pages losing citations
- Identify pages with citations but poor clicks
- Suggest internal linking targets between cited pages and revenue pages
Used this way, Copilot becomes a fast analyst that shortens the gap between “what happened” and “what do we do about it”.
Recommendations: treat it like a backlog, not a lecture
The reworked Recommendations panel (replacing the older “Top Insights” approach) is pitched as site-specific and actionable. The best way to get value from it is to treat it like an engineering backlog: triage, batch, ship.
After you read a recommendation, ask two questions:
- Will this change improve crawlability, clarity, or trust?
- Can we measure impact in BWT within 2 to 4 weeks?
That second question matters because it keeps the work honest. When you pair Recommendations with 16 months of retained data (expanded in late 2024), you can also check whether you are solving recurring seasonal problems rather than chasing one-off noise.
A note on links: disavow is gone, so your response needs to change
Bing removed the Disavow Links feature in October 2023, backed by improved AI-driven link analysis that can ignore spammy links without manual intervention. That shifts the webmaster’s role away from link clean-up rituals and towards stronger fundamentals.
If you notice suspicious link patterns, focus on what you can control: content quality, site security, clear branding signals, and a natural link profile earned through genuine publishing.
When link-related anxiety starts to creep into decision-making, use a simple checklist:
- Site integrity: keep CMS, plugins, and access controls tight to prevent injected pages and unwanted outbound links.
- Content intent: publish pages that satisfy intent cleanly, with crisp structure and claims that can be supported.
- Reputation signals: make authorship, contact details, and organisational context easy to verify where relevant.
- Monitoring cadence: watch BWT crawl errors and indexing anomalies, since technical compromise can look like “SEO problems” at first glance.
That approach fits Bing’s direction: their AI is handling more of the spam filtering, while you handle the signals that show you deserve to be cited.
How BWT’s AI reporting compares with other tools
BWT is not trying to be a paid SEO suite, and it is not trying to copy Google Search Console feature-for-feature. Its strongest differentiator is reporting on AI answer visibility at all, and then tying that back to pages and queries.
User sentiment lines up with that positioning. Reviews tend to praise speed, clarity, and the usefulness of the reports, while still acknowledging Google’s broader maturity and adoption. Ratings also reflect that gap in market footprint as much as feature quality.
| Tool | What it is best for | A realistic expectation |
|---|---|---|
| Bing Webmaster Tools | AI citations visibility, IndexNow workflows, Bing-specific diagnostics | Best when used alongside GSC, not instead of it |
| Google Search Console | Wider ecosystem maturity, deep Google indexing signals | Still limited in explicit AI-answer reporting |
| Ahrefs / Semrush-style suites | Competitive research, link intelligence, content tooling | Paid platforms that do not represent a search engine’s own reporting |
If your audience includes Windows users, Microsoft Edge users, or markets where Bing has meaningful share, BWT is no longer optional housekeeping. It becomes part of how you measure reach across both classic and AI interfaces.
A practical 30-day rhythm for the AI Performance era
The teams that benefit most from these updates will be the ones that operationalise them. A repeatable rhythm beats sporadic deep dives.
- Week 1: Baseline AI citations, cited pages, and grounding queries, then tag your “top 20” pages by citations.
- Week 2: Improve those pages for reference quality (tight definitions, updated facts, clearer subheadings, better internal links).
- Week 3: Use IndexNow for every meaningful update, then monitor IndexNow Insights and URL inspection for lagging pages.
- Week 4: Compare AI clicks and AI CTR against classic search clicks and CTR, then refine pages that get cited but do not earn visits.
Keep the scope modest. Two to five pages improved each week can move the needle more reliably than a large rewrite plan that never ships.
What to watch next as Bing iterates
The AI Performance dashboard is in public preview, and the most useful improvements tend to arrive in response to predictable needs: deeper segmentation, cleaner query grouping, clearer attribution across AI surfaces, and tighter integration between reporting and action.
Copilot’s language support is another obvious frontier. As it expands beyond English, it will change how multilingual sites diagnose performance inside BWT, especially in markets where translation and localisation choices affect how prompts are phrased.
In the meantime, the opportunity is already clear: measure citations, earn them on purpose, keep key pages fresh, and use the combination of AI Performance, Recommendations, and IndexNow to build a publishing system that is ready for AI-mediated discovery.