How to get cited by Bing Copilot
Bing Copilot uses Bingbot — the regular Bing search crawler.No separate Copilot bot exists. Three steps get you cited: submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, ensure Bingbot is allowed in robots.txt, ship FAQPage + Organization schema. Small sites surface in Bing's index more easily than Google's — competitive density is roughly 3× lower — making Bing Copilot the most achievable AI-citation win for new domains.
Run a free GEO audit. Same checks as ChatGPT Search (also rides Bing).
Three steps to Bing Copilot citation
1. Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools. bing.com/webmasters. Verify via DNS, meta tag, or BingSiteAuth.xml. Submit your sitemap. This is the single highest-leverage step — most teams skip it and remain invisible to Bing Copilot indefinitely.
2. Allow Bingbot in robots.txt. Default robots.txt allows all crawlers, so this is usually fine. Check anyway — a copy-pasted “block all bots except Googlebot” rule will exclude Bingbot too. The User-Agent to allow: Bingbot.
3. Ship FAQPage + Organization schema. Same templates as the Google AI Overviews stack — Bing Copilot extracts answer paragraphs from FAQPage schema and resolves brand entities from Organization JSON-LD. Validate via the schema validator.
Optional accelerant: enable IndexNow. Microsoft + Yandex + Cloudflare maintain this push-based indexing protocol. Ping IndexNow on every deploy and your changed URLs hit Bing's index in minutes instead of days. Vercel and Cloudflare Workers have one-line integrations.
Why Bing is the easier AI-citation win
Bing's index is roughly 30-40% the size of Google's. For most queries, ranking competition is materially weaker. A small site with good content can rank #5 in Bing for a query where it's position #45 in Google. That same rank advantage carries through to Bing Copilot citations and (because ChatGPT Search rides Bing) to ChatGPT citations too.
Practical implication: submit to Bing Webmaster Tools BEFORE running ProductHunt or content campaigns. The first 30 days of new content benefit most from Bing's lower-competition window before competitors notice.
FAQ
Does Bing Copilot use a separate crawler?
No. Bing Copilot uses Bingbot — the same crawler that builds Bing's classic search index. There is no dedicated "CopilotBot." If you're in Bing's index, you're eligible for Copilot citation. The practical implication: getting indexed on Bing is the first and most important Copilot-citation step, and it's often the most-skipped — most teams set up Google Search Console but never submit to Bing Webmaster Tools.
Why is Bing Copilot citation easier to win than ChatGPT?
Bing's index is roughly 1/3 the size of Google's, so the competitive density for any given query is lower. Small sites with good content rank in Bing for queries where they're invisible on Google. Since Bing Copilot pulls from this less-competitive index, citation slots open up. Same logic applies to ChatGPT Search (which also rides Bing) — but ChatGPT's freshness model favors very recent content more aggressively.
How do I submit my site to Bing?
Bing Webmaster Tools (bing.com/webmasters). Verify ownership via DNS, meta tag, or BingSiteAuth.xml. Submit your sitemap. Use the URL Submission API to ping individual URLs on publish (10,000/day quota free). Within 48-72 hours your content is crawled and eligible for Copilot citation.
Does IndexNow help with Bing Copilot citations?
Yes. IndexNow is a protocol Microsoft + Yandex + Cloudflare promote — it lets you push URLs to multiple search engines simultaneously when content changes. For Bing specifically, IndexNow accelerates indexing from "48-72 hours" to "minutes." For a fresh deploy, ping IndexNow with the changed URLs and Bing Copilot can cite the new content the same day.
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot also cite my site?
Yes, when the user invokes web search inside M365 Copilot (Word, Outlook, Teams). Same retrieval pipeline as Bing Copilot. The same optimization stack applies — Bing index presence, FAQPage schema, Organization JSON-LD. M365 traffic is harder to track in analytics because the referrer is often stripped, but it counts.
Audit your Bing Copilot citability
Free first scan. Checks Bingbot access, FAQPage schema, Organization JSON-LD.