Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft introduced the Copilot brand in September 2023, positioning it as “your everyday AI companion,” and folded its earlier Bing Chat (the AI mode inside Bing search) under the same name later that year. Today Copilot spans several surfaces: a standalone app and website, the answer panel in Bing, Copilot in Edge and Windows, and the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot for work documents.

The consumer version is the one that matters for search visibility. When someone asks Copilot a question, it does not reply from model memory alone. It rewrites the request into internal search queries, pulls matching documents from Bing’s web index, and composes an answer with footnote-style links to the pages it used.

Why it cites different sources than Google

Copilot reads Bing’s index, not Google’s. A page can rank well in Google and still be invisible to Copilot if Bingbot cannot crawl it or Bing never indexed it. Microsoft also co-developed IndexNow, so new and updated URLs can be pushed to Bing within seconds instead of waiting on a crawl.

In February 2026 Microsoft added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools. It shows total citations, which of your URLs get cited, and the “grounding queries,” meaning the phrases Copilot actually searched rather than the user’s typed prompt. That last signal is useful: it tells you which questions your page is already answering inside AI results, and where you are close but not yet chosen.