Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI are quietly becoming some of the most commercially important surfaces in AI search. While everyone obsesses over ChatGPT, Copilot is embedded directly into Windows, Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing itself. That means it reaches people mid-task, not just when they actively open a search tab. Getting cited there is a different discipline to Google SEO, and most e-commerce brands are not set up for it.
This guide breaks down exactly what Copilot and Bing AI look for when they decide which sources to cite, what you need to fix on your site, and what the realistic timeline looks like.
How Bing AI and Copilot Actually Select Sources
Bing's AI layer is built on top of Bing's traditional index, combined with a large language model. When a user asks Copilot a question, the system retrieves pages from Bing's index, re-ranks them using relevance signals, and then synthesises an answer. Citations come from pages that ranked well enough to be retrieved and were deemed trustworthy enough to quote.
This matters for one simple reason: if Bing does not index your pages properly, you will never be cited. Copilot cannot cite what it cannot find. The starting point is always Bing Webmaster Tools, not an AI-specific tweak.
That said, Bing's ranking signals differ meaningfully from Google's. Bing places heavier emphasis on:
- On-page clarity. Bing rewards pages where the answer to a query appears in the first 150 words. It is less patient than Google when content buries the point.
- Author signals. Bing surfaces author names, credentials, and bios more prominently than Google does. Pages without a clear author are disadvantaged, especially for health, finance, and product advice queries.
- Structured data. Bing explicitly supports a wide range of schema types and uses them to understand page context. A product page with complete Product schema is more likely to be retrieved as a citation than one without.
- Social authority. Bing historically factored in social signals more than Google. Mentions on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook do carry some weight in Bing's trust calculation.
Getting Your Site Into Bing's Index Properly
This sounds basic, but a surprising number of sites are underindexed on Bing compared to Google. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and setting it up takes about twenty minutes. Submit your XML sitemap there directly. Do not assume Bing discovers pages the same way Google does because it does not crawl at anywhere near the same speed.
Check the index coverage report inside Bing Webmaster Tools. Look for pages that are blocked by robots.txt, pages returning errors, and pages flagged as low quality. Fix these before worrying about anything else. A page Bing has not indexed cannot appear in a Copilot citation, full stop.
There is also Bing's IndexNow protocol. This is an open standard that lets you push URL notifications to Bing (and other participating search engines) the moment you publish or update a page. Most modern CMS platforms support IndexNow natively or via plugin. Enabling it means your new content gets seen by Bing within hours rather than weeks. For e-commerce brands publishing product updates or new category pages, this is genuinely worth doing.
Structured Data That Bing and Copilot Respond To
Bing's documentation on structured data is underread. The search engine explicitly lists the schema types it uses to generate rich results and to understand page content for its AI layer. The types that matter most for Copilot citation candidacy are:
Product Schema
If you sell products, every product page should have complete Product schema with at least name, description, image, offers (with price, currency, and availability), brand, and aggregate ratings where you have reviews. Bing uses this to understand what you sell and match it to shopping queries. Copilot will often pull product information directly from structured data when answering "where can I buy X" style questions.
Article and BlogPosting Schema
For informational content, Article or BlogPosting schema with a populated author field is important. Include the author's name and, if possible, link to a Person schema entity that describes their credentials. This directly addresses Bing's emphasis on author authority. A post with no author attribution is a weaker citation candidate than one where the author is clearly identified.
FAQPage Schema
FAQ schema was deprecated for Google rich results, but Bing still uses it. Pages with FAQPage schema are well-suited to Copilot's question-and-answer format. If you have informational pages covering common customer questions, mark them up with FAQPage schema. This increases the likelihood that Copilot pulls your specific answer into its response. The team at FlinnSchema sees this pattern consistently across client sites: FAQ schema lifts Bing AI citation rates noticeably even when it does nothing extra for Google.
Organisation and LocalBusiness Schema
Brand-level schema helps Bing understand who you are. Organisation schema with a complete name, URL, logo, contact information, and social profile links strengthens your entity presence. For local businesses, LocalBusiness schema with accurate address, opening hours, and geo-coordinates is important because Copilot handles a significant volume of local intent queries, especially on mobile and through Windows search.
If you want a full picture of where your schema stands and what is costing you Bing AI citations, a free AI visibility audit is a practical starting point.
Content Formatting for Copilot's Summarisation Model
Copilot synthesises answers from multiple sources. The way your content is formatted determines whether it gets quoted or skipped.
Lead with the answer
Copilot, like most AI systems, extracts the most direct answer it can find. If your page opens with background context and only gets to the actual answer four paragraphs in, another page that leads with the answer will be cited instead. Put the core answer in the first paragraph of any section. Think of each H2 section as a mini-article with its own direct opening.
Use numbered lists and headers for process content
When covering how-to content, numbered lists and clear H3 subheadings make extraction much easier. Copilot is more likely to lift a clean numbered step from your content than a narrative paragraph where the steps are buried in prose. This is not about dumbing content down. It is about making the structure machine-readable while keeping the explanations genuinely useful.
Keep sentences short around key facts
Copilot tends to extract short, declarative sentences when forming citations. If your key facts are embedded in long, complex sentences with lots of qualifying clauses, they are harder to lift cleanly. Important claims deserve their own sentence.
Avoid thin pages
Bing's quality signals penalise thin content more aggressively than Google does in some categories. A product page with fifty words of description is a weak candidate for any kind of AI citation. Aim for at least 300 words on product pages and 800+ on informational pages. These are not magic numbers, but they reflect the minimum required to actually answer a question properly.
Building Authority Signals That Bing Trusts
Bing's trust model leans on what you might call "verifiable authority." That means signals beyond your own site.
Wikipedia mentions, Wikidata entries, and coverage in news publications all strengthen your entity's standing in Bing's knowledge graph. This is not about links in the traditional SEO sense. It is about your brand appearing in contexts that Bing treats as authoritative. A single mention in a credible trade publication can do more for your Copilot citation rate than fifty directory links.
LinkedIn is worth taking seriously for this reason. Bing and Microsoft have a data-sharing relationship through the Microsoft ecosystem. A well-maintained LinkedIn company page with regular posts, a solid follower count, and employee profiles linking to the company genuinely appears to support Bing entity recognition. This is not guaranteed or officially confirmed, but the correlation is consistent enough to be worth acting on.
For more on how entity-level authority affects AI citation rates across multiple platforms, the guide on building topical authority for AI search covers the underlying mechanics in detail.
What to Monitor and How to Know It Is Working
Tracking Copilot citations is harder than tracking Google traffic. Copilot does not always send referral traffic with a clean UTM source. Some Bing AI traffic appears as direct traffic in Google Analytics. Some comes through with a Bing referrer. Very little of it comes tagged as "Copilot" specifically.
The most reliable method right now is to monitor your brand in Bing Chat / Copilot manually. Set up a habit of querying Copilot with the questions your customers ask most. "Where can I buy [product type] in the UK?" or "What is the best [product category] for [use case]?" See whether your brand appears. Note which pages get cited when it does. That gives you a feedback loop for testing changes.
Bing Webmaster Tools also shows click data segmented by query. While this is traditional Bing search data rather than Copilot-specific data, improvements here tend to correlate with improvements in Copilot citation frequency because the underlying index is the same.
The tools comparison guide covering Profound, Peec, and Otterly covers third-party options for tracking AI citation rates more systematically if you want to move beyond manual checking.
A Realistic Timeline
Most sites that implement proper schema, fix their Bing indexation issues, and improve their content formatting start seeing Copilot citations appear within six to ten weeks. Some see movement sooner if their domain already has reasonable Bing authority. Sites starting from scratch with low Bing indexation can take three to four months before citations become consistent.
The brands that do best are those that treat Bing and Copilot as a distinct channel rather than an afterthought to their Google strategy. The optimisation overlap is real, but Bing's specifics, author signals, social authority, IndexNow, and its own structured data priorities, require deliberate attention. Most competitors are not paying that attention yet. That is an advantage worth taking.
If you want FlinnSchema to assess exactly where your site stands, the free AI visibility audit covers Bing and Copilot alongside ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does optimising for Bing SEO automatically improve Copilot citations?
Partially. Copilot pulls from Bing's index, so better Bing rankings do increase your chances of being cited. But Copilot's citation selection also considers content formatting, structured data, and author signals separately from pure ranking. You need both the ranking and the content structure to be cited reliably.
Is FAQ schema still worth adding for Bing AI?
Yes. Unlike Google, which dropped FAQ rich results for most sites, Bing still uses FAQPage schema to understand and surface page content. For informational pages, FAQ schema increases the likelihood that Copilot extracts your answer directly. It is one of the higher-value schema types for Bing AI specifically.
How is Microsoft Copilot different from Bing AI?
Bing AI refers to the AI-powered features built into Bing search, including the chat interface. Microsoft Copilot is the broader brand name Microsoft now uses for its AI assistant, which appears across Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Bing. Both draw on the same underlying index and model, so optimising for one effectively covers the other.
Can a small e-commerce brand realistically get cited by Copilot?
Yes, and often more easily than in Google's featured snippets. Copilot cites the most relevant and clearly structured source it finds, not necessarily the highest domain authority. A product page with complete schema markup and a well-written, direct description can outperform a large retailer's thin product page. Specificity and structure matter more than raw authority on many queries.