Source: SEO – Practical Ecommerce by Ann Smarty. Read the original article
TL;DR Summary of AI Search Performance Reporting and Bing’s New Webmaster Tools
AI search lacks native performance reporting, making it challenging for businesses to measure organic visibility effectively. Bing’s new AI Performance Report in Webmaster Tools offers transparency by tracking citations in Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated summaries. However, the report has limitations, such as no traffic or click data and no filtering by specific AI surfaces. Despite these gaps, it’s a valuable first step toward understanding how AI-driven answers cite website content.
Optimixed’s Overview: Enhancing Organic Visibility Insights with Bing’s AI Performance Report
Understanding the Challenges of AI Search Reporting
Unlike traditional SEO, AI search engines currently provide limited native tools for performance tracking, leaving marketers uncertain about which AI channels drive visibility and traffic. Google’s Search Console merges AI overview data with organic listings without clear attribution, while ChatGPT restricts metrics to licensed content publishers.
Bing’s AI Performance Report: Features and Insights
- Tracks citations from Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated Bing summaries, and select AI partner integrations.
- Displays Total Citations and Average Cited Pages over a chosen period.
- Lists Grounding Queries: key phrases AI uses to retrieve cited content.
- Shows Pages: URLs cited in AI answers along with frequency of mention.
- Provides visibility trends but lacks traffic, click-through data, and detailed integration info.
Maximizing the Report’s Potential
Though the report lacks actionable traffic data, it can be leveraged by:
- Researching organic keywords that drive traffic to cited URLs on Bing and Google.
- Using AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to convert keywords into prompts for content optimization.
- Analyzing common query modifiers to understand how AI agents discover and cite your pages.
Getting Started with Bing Webmaster Tools
Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is straightforward:
- Log in with a Microsoft account.
- Add your site and import data from Google Search Console.
- Allow approximately 24 hours for data collection and reporting.
This integration facilitates tracking your site’s presence within AI-generated search results, marking a significant step towards improving organic visibility in the evolving AI search landscape.
