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Earlier this year, we introduced the AI Performance Report in Bing Webmaster Tools, giving publishers and site owners new visibility into how their content appears in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing, and select partner AI experiences. We coupled that launch with information about our broader vision behind the AI Performance Dashboard: helping organizations better understand how they show up across the AI web.
Today, we are excited to expand that foundation with four new capabilities available in preview globally within Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare.
The original AI Performance experience helped answer an important question: Where is my content being cited in AI-generated answers? These new capabilities build on that foundation by helping publishers better understand why their content is being surfaced, which broader subject areas they are gaining visibility in, how their presence evolves relative to other cited sources, and how citation patterns change over time.
As AI-powered experiences continue to evolve, publishers increasingly need tools that go beyond traditional rankings and keyword analysis. AI-generated answers are dynamic, contextual, and often synthesized from many sources at once. Understanding visibility in these systems requires more than a single metric or surface-level citation count. With these expanded preview capabilities, Bing Webmaster Tools is expanding first-party reporting to provide deeper insight into the query context, thematic patterns, relative citation presence, and changes over time that shape how content appears in AI-powered experiences.
That is the goal behind these new capabilities.
Understanding the Intent Behind Citations
One of the biggest challenges publishers face today is understanding the context behind AI-generated citations. A query alone often tells only part of the story.
In AI-generated answers, grounding refers to the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response. For deeper understanding of grounding – refer to Elevating the Role of Grounding on the AI Web and our recent Microsoft WebIQ announcement.
With the new Intents feature, grounding queries in the AI Performance Report are now classified into broader categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local, and more. This helps publishers move beyond simply seeing which queries triggered citations and begin understanding the broader query context our systems associate with those citation appearances.
For example, an e-commerce publisher may discover strong visibility in comparison-oriented or shopping-focused AI experiences, while an educational publisher may find that their content is frequently surfaced in research or learning-oriented interactions. These insights can help publishers better align content structure and depth with the types of experiences where AI systems are surfacing their content.
Seeing Visibility Through Topics Instead of Individual Queries
We are also introducing Topics, which group related grounding queries into broader thematic clusters. AI systems reason across concepts and themes rather than isolated keywords. Topics help publishers understand visibility in the same thematic structure that modern AI systems use to organize information.
Instead of analyzing visibility one query at a time, publishers can now start understanding which larger subject areas are driving citation activity. Queries such as “solar panels,” “solar energy efficiency,” and “residential solar installation,” for example, may all map into a broader topic cluster like Solar Energy.
This creates a more natural way to analyze AI visibility. Content teams and publishers often think in terms of themes, editorial areas, and audience interests rather than isolated keywords. Topics help bridge that gap by turning grounding query data into a more thematic view of AI engagement.
These insights can help publishers identify emerging areas of authority, discover gaps in topical coverage, and better understand how AI systems semantically group related content.
Like Intents, Topics are powered by evolving AI/ML classification systems. During the preview phase, some labels may still be broad – especially for highly specialized or niche domains – but the system is already beginning to reveal meaningful thematic patterns. We expect quality and precision to continue improving as the models mature and learn from broader real-world usage.
Introducing Citation Share
The next new capability we are introducing today is Citation Share.
While total citation counts show how often your content appears in AI-generated answers, Citation Share shows how much of the citation space your site receives for a specific grounding query. It is calculated as the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query. This helps publishers understand not just whether they were cited, but how much visibility they received within the full set of cited sources for that query.
This can provide a more directional view into how visibility is evolving over time. Publishers may begin to identify areas where their content has strong and growing representation in AI-generated experiences, as well as areas where visibility may be more fragmented across many sources.
Importantly, Citation Share is designed as an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content.
AI citation ecosystems are inherently dynamic. Citation patterns can shift due to changes in user behavior, evolving models, freshness signals, partner refresh cycles, and broader changes across the web itself.
Compare Changes Over Time
We are also introducing Compare, which allows publishers to overlay a previous time period directly onto the current reporting view.
This makes it easier to visually understand how citation activity is changing over time and observe shifts that may correlate with content updates, seasonality, changing demand, or broader ecosystem changes.
For example, publishers can compare the current 30-day period against the prior 30 days or select custom date ranges to better understand evolving citation trends.
Compare is designed to help publishers observe changes over time. Citation activity can be influenced by many factors including evolving AI models, competing content, freshness signals, and shifts in user demand.
Increasing transparency
These new capabilities are part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide greater transparency into how content appears across AI-powered experiences. As AI answers become a larger part of how people discover information, publishers need more than raw citation counts – they need reporting that helps them understand the context, topics, relative presence, and changes over time behind those citations.
That is what this work is designed to advance. Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare give publishers a more practical way to observe citation activity, identify visibility patterns, and make more informed decisions about their content strategy. They do not turn AI visibility into a single ranking or score, but they do give webmasters a richer set of signals for understanding how their content is being represented across evolving AI experiences.
As the AI web continues to evolve, we will continue investing in new reporting capabilities, richer analytics, and better visibility tools for webmasters and content creators. These preview features are early steps in a broader effort to make AI visibility more understandable, actionable, and useful for the publisher ecosystem.
Availability and Providing Feedback
Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare are now beginning to roll out in preview within Bing Webmaster Tools globally today. These capabilities are early preview innovations built on continuously advancing AI/ML systems and aggregated citation signals. As more data becomes available and more publishers engage with these experiences, we expect the quality, coverage, and precision of these capabilities to continue strengthening over time.
We encourage publishers, content creators, GEOs, and site owners to explore these new capabilities. Additionally, we are now introducing a preview feature to provide us with your feedback within the AI Performance Dashboard context through an easy-to-use UI.
To learn more about the existing AI Performance experience, see:
- Bing Webmaster Tools & How-to: AI Performance FAQs
- Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools – Public Preview
- The AI Performance Dashboard: Your View into Where Your Brand Appears Across the AI Web
Krishna Madhavan, Meenaz Merchant, Saral Nigam, and Trishna Shah
Product Managers, Microsoft AI
