How to appear in Microsoft Copilot answers: what Bing’s guidelines say

How Copilot uses the web

Microsoft’s documentation says that Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat use generated search queries sent to the Bing search service to ground their responses in web data. In other words, if a page is not in Bing, Copilot is unlikely to cite it.

Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines describe how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes, evaluates and surfaces content across Bing search, Copilot and grounding API results. Following them, according to Bing, helps URLs be eligible for indexing and ranking, and for grounding results and citations.

Step 1: make sure Bing finds your pages

Bing lists these ways to help it discover URLs:

• IndexNow URL submission — instant notification about new and changed pages;
• XML sitemaps;
• crawlable internal links;
• external links from relevant websites.

Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap there; many CMS platforms and CDNs can send IndexNow notifications automatically.

Step 2: check directives that block Copilot

Bing recommends avoiding NOCACHE on content intended for Copilot or grounding experiences. Check your meta robots tags and HTTP headers: these directives are sometimes added by CMS plugins without the owner noticing.

Step 3: write content Copilot can use

The guidelines describe what grounded answers need:

1. Clear, focused and useful content that fully satisfies user intent, is original and is easy to understand without external context. Thin, ad-heavy or affiliate-only pages may lose grounding visibility.
2. Explicit facts. Facts and definitions should be explicit, key statements should not rely on implied content, and important information should be visible on the URL itself.
3. Clear entities. Define names of companies, products and places clearly and consistently.
4. Clean HTML structure: title and meta description, a logical H1–H6 hierarchy, semantic HTML.
5. Images and video support the text, not replace it: descriptive file names, alt text, captions or transcripts.
6. Accurate structured data. According to Bing, it may support clearer grounding but does not guarantee visibility, and it must reflect visible content.

Bing treats content designed to manipulate or interfere with language models — prompt injection — as abuse that can lead to reduced visibility, suppressed grounding or removal from the index.

Step 4: measure citations

On 10 February 2026 Microsoft introduced AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (public preview). It shows total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries — the phrases AI used to retrieve your content — and citations per page across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. This is currently one of the few places where a search engine shows AI citations of your site directly.