Microsoft Copilot and Claude: The Quiet Surfaces
Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in Bing, and Bing Webmaster Tools now reports which of your pages were cited in AI answers, which query triggered it and what share of the citations for that query were yours. It is free, it takes about an hour to set up, and almost nobody has looked at it. Claude retrieves live and rewards the same things Perplexity does. Neither sends the volume Google does. Both are used inside businesses, which is where B2B enquiries begin.
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Copilot runs on Bing, and Microsoft says so
Microsoft’s own documentation is explicit: when web search is enabled, Copilot may fetch information from the Bing search service where information from the web helps produce a better grounded response, generating a search query from the user’s prompt and composing the answer from what comes back.
So Copilot visibility is Bing visibility, with an extraction layer on top. There is no separate Copilot index to court and no submission process. If Bing cannot find you, Copilot cannot name you, and the number of UK businesses that have never once checked their site in Bing Webmaster Tools is remarkable given it costs nothing.
The Bing Webmaster Tools hour, and what it now gives you
This is the part that has changed and that most advice has not caught up with. Microsoft added an AI Performance report in February 2026 and extended it in June 2026. It reports the total citations your site received in AI generated answers, the average number of unique pages cited per day, the grounding queries the AI used when it retrieved your content, and citation activity by URL. The June additions group those queries into intents and topics and add a citation share figure, which Microsoft describes as the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown for that same grounding query.
“Citation activity does not indicate ranking, authority, or the role of any page within an individual answer.”
Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance announcement, February 2026
Read alongside Google’s report, which combines AI Overviews and AI Mode into one impressions figure, Microsoft is currently giving site owners more granular first party data about AI citation than Google is. That is a strange sentence to write and it is true as at the date on this page. The practical instruction is short: verify the site, submit the sitemap, turn on IndexNow if your CMS supports it, and open the AI Performance report once a month.
IndexNow is worth an accurate sentence, because it gets oversold too. It notifies participating engines that a URL has changed, which speeds discovery. It does not influence ranking, and submitting a URL does not guarantee it will be indexed. Bing participates, as do Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep. Google does not.
Claude, and what it fetches
Anthropic documents three agents: ClaudeBot, which collects web content for training and development, Claude-User, which fetches pages because a user asked a question, and Claude-SearchBot, which supports search quality. Each is blocked by name in robots.txt in the ordinary way, and Anthropic publishes its crawler IP ranges rather than asking you to trust the user agent.
Behaviourally, Claude rewards what Perplexity rewards: a page that states its answer plainly, carries a visible date, and does not require a script to render its content. There is no separate technique here, which is the honest answer even though it is a shorter one than most pages on this subject give.
Why these surfaces matter more than their traffic share
The traffic argument for Copilot and Claude is weak and we are not going to make it. The distribution argument is strong. Copilot is embedded in Microsoft 365, which is the software your buyer already has open at their desk, and its answers arrive inside the tools they work in rather than in a browser tab they chose to open. Claude is used heavily for research and drafting inside businesses.
For a consumer brand this is a rounding error. For a manufacturer whose product gets specified by an engineer with Copilot in the sidebar, it is the moment the shortlist is written. The cost of covering it is an hour in Bing Webmaster Tools and not blocking anything you did not mean to block.
Frequently asked questions
Related guides
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Sources
- Microsoft Learn. Data, privacy and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot. Updated 18 August 2026. Microsoft’s statement that Copilot fetches information from the Bing search service to ground responses.
- Bing Webmaster Blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. 10 February 2026. Total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page level citation activity, and Microsoft’s caveat that citation is not a ranking signal.
- Bing Webmaster Blog. New AI Visibility Insights: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare. 16 June 2026. Citation share defined as the percentage of citations attributed to your site for the same grounding query.
- Anthropic. Anthropic web crawlers and how to block them. Updated 7 April 2026. ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, what each does and how to block each by name.
- IndexNow. IndexNow frequently asked questions. Read 3 September 2026. Participating engines, and the statement that submitting a URL does not guarantee indexing.
Every figure on this page was read on the source page listed above. This page is reviewed monthly and the last checked date is updated when it is.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bing worth the effort for a UK business?
For the search traffic alone, marginally. For the AI citation reporting it now gives you free, yes. Bing Webmaster Tools is currently the only place a UK site owner can see which individual pages were cited in AI answers and for which queries, and that is useful even if you never chase Bing traffic itself.
What is the difference between ClaudeBot and Claude-User?
ClaudeBot collects web content for model training and development. Claude-User fetches a specific page because a person asked Claude to look at it. Blocking the first is a position on training. Blocking the second stops a page loading for somebody who explicitly asked for it, which is rarely what anyone intends.
Do these surfaces send measurable traffic?
Not much, and you should plan on the assumption that they will not. Copilot appears in GA4 within the AI Assistant channel where it sends a referral at all. The reason to cover them is presence at the point a business buyer is shortlisting, not sessions.
Does IndexNow help with AI visibility?
Indirectly and modestly. It tells participating engines a URL has changed so it is discovered sooner, which matters if you publish or update often. It is not a ranking signal and it does not guarantee indexing. Google does not participate.
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