Field note
Bing showed us which of our pages Copilot cites. Thirteen of fourteen went to one guide.
A free report most owners have never opened, what it said about us, and what it said about the links we thought we had.
By Eugene Romanov·Published
The short answer
Bing Webmaster Tools has a free AI Performance report that shows which of your pages Microsoft Copilot cited. Ours, read on 2026-10-24, counted 14 citations between 5 September and 22 October, and 13 of them went to one page: a guide to what a small-business website costs in Florida. The same tool listed six domains linking to us, and five of them are sites we built ourselves.
SHT-02Field note
Where the report is
In Bing Webmaster Tools, under AI Performance, marked beta. The page says what it counts in one line: "Citation sources: Microsoft Copilots and Partners". It has a table by day, a list of the pages that were cited, and a list of the questions behind the citations, which it calls grounding queries. It costs nothing; the only requirement is a site verified in the tool, and a site already verified in Google Search Console can be imported.
What ours said
The table ran from 5 September to 22 October 2026, 48 days. Fourteen citations in total: one on 9 September, twelve on 6 October, one on 7 October, and zero on every other day. Two pages were cited: /website-cost-florida 13 times and /locations once. Not the home page, not the pricing page, not a single service page. The list of grounding queries said "No data available", so we do not know what was asked. The page itself notes that the figures are a sample of overall activity.
Why that page, as far as we can tell
We can only guess, and the report does not say. The guide answers one question a buyer actually types, what a small-business website costs, and it answers it in its first paragraph with ranges for a freelancer, an agency and a builder, before it says a word about us. Our service pages start with us. It was published on 2 July 2026, before the studio moved to Sacramento, which also means the one page an assistant chose to quote is about a state we no longer work from.
The links were mostly ours
The Backlinks report in the same tool listed 6 referring domains, 193 referring pages and 12 anchor texts. Three domains carried almost all of them: inchwall.com and wallflow.pro with 66 each, and easy-move-sacramento.com with 57. All three are our own products and our own business. Two more, yoursaunas.com and dogtransportusa.com, are client sites we built, one link each. The sixth, mazkra.com, a web design studio in Florida, had two, both to the Florida cost guide. The home page of the tool carried a banner that put it plainly: "Your site does not have enough inbound links from high quality domains." Links from our own sites say little about whether anyone else vouches for us.
What we did about it
We submitted every address in our sitemap to Bing, 273 of 273, in three batches between 24 and 26 October, because the tool accepts 100 a day. We asked Google Search Console to crawl 13 pages again, 9 on 24 October and 4 on 26 October: the ones whose last crawl predated our new prices, and the ones that were not indexed at all. We corrected the directory listings that assistants had been quoting, which is the subject of the previous note. And we started on links from outside: two article pitches to trade publications and three answers to journalists' requests. None of those has been published yet, and some may never be.
A check you can run this week
Open Bing Webmaster Tools and add your site; if it is already in Google Search Console, import it from there. Then open two reports. In AI Performance, write down which pages were cited, if any, and on which days. In Backlinks, go through the referring domains and cross out every one that is yours, your other business, or a site that links to you because you built it. What is left is the number that matters, and it is often smaller than an owner expects. Ours was at most one.
What we will look at next
On 9 November we will ask the same twenty questions of the same five assistants, as in the previous note, and read this report again. If the corrected listings and the new pages have been read, the cited pages should change. If they have not, the report will say so, and that will be the next note.
SHT-04FAQ
Questions this post answers.
- N01Does Google have a report like this?
- Not one that lists AI citations on their own. Google Search Console reports clicks and impressions for search as a whole. Bing's AI Performance report is the only one we have found that lists the pages an assistant cited, which is why we read it first.
- N02Is a link from my own other website worth anything?
- It helps a search engine find the page, and that is worth something on a new site. As evidence that someone else trusts you, it is weak, and Bing's own banner told us so. Links from customers, suppliers, local associations and publications are the ones that change that banner.
- N03Why would an assistant cite a guide rather than a service page?
- We do not know for certain, and the report gives no reasons. Our best guess is that the guide answers the question a buyer asks in its first lines, while a service page opens with an answer to a question nobody asked: who we are.