Microsoft Copilot & Bing: AI Search Updates and Citation Tracker

Comscore released its Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report on 22nd Sep. Its press release says "Bing's Copilot Search increased from 11.8% to 17.3%" between July 2025 and June 2026.

The same sentence puts Google's AI Overviews at 39.4% of US desktop searches. So Bing shows an AI answer on fewer than half as many searches as Google does.

The measure is the share of searches that carried the feature, from Comscore's US desktop panel. Search Engine Land notes the report "did not measure clicks or traffic generated by them".

Copilot's share of AI prompt volume "held at 5%" from January to June, per Search Engine Land's read. ChatGPT fell from 70% to 50% over the same months.

Gemini rose from 17% to 30% and Claude from 2% to 11%.

Microsoft has published no prevalence figure of its own for Copilot Search. This is the first panel measurement of it on this page.

Comscore sells audience measurement, and the report markets that service. The figures come from its own panel rather than from a client.

On 17th Sep, the news plaintiffs in the OpenAI copyright litigation (S.D.N.Y., 25-md-3143) filed a less-redacted public brief.

The plaintiffs include The New York Times, the Daily News titles and Ziff Davis. The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Intercept are plaintiffs too.

The case is before Judge Sidney H. Stein.

One passage rests on Microsoft's numbers. The brief says Microsoft's "representative CTR data shows that the overall click-through rate reduction between Bing Chat and Bing Web Search was 87% to 93% for The Times's websites".

The same sentence gives "83% to 91%" for the Daily News sites and "51% to 94%" for Ziff Davis sites. The brief cites its statement of facts, paragraph 1536, for all three.

The data itself is not in the public brief. What is public is the plaintiffs' description of it, so the ranges are an advocate's summary of discovery material.

The brief also quotes a Microsoft survey expert: 37.2% of Copilot respondents would use "traditional web search inquiries" without a generative AI tool.

It also cites a third-party study. It says 87.78% of ChatGPT users visit no external website during a search, against 26.91% of Google users.

The brief does not name the study.

This page does not treat that figure as a finding.

The brief opposes the defendants' summary-judgment motions and seeks judgment on unauthorized copying. PPC Land, which surfaced the figures, dates those motions to 4th Sep.

For site owners, this is the first Microsoft-measured comparison of an AI answer against web search on the public record. They describe Bing Chat, the product that became Copilot, for a handful of publisher domains.

They are not a measurement of Copilot Search today, and the brief does not date the comparison window.

PPC Land reported the figures on 21st Sep. We read the brief from the CourtListener mirror.

Going to copilot.microsoft.com now produces a sign-in screen rather than an answer box. We checked on 1st Sep and found no way past it.

The page offers sign-in with a Microsoft, Apple or Google account and nothing else.

Microsoft confirmed it is deliberate. Krishna Madhavan, a principal product manager at Microsoft AI, Bing, told Search Engine Roundtable: "Going forward we are requiring all Copilot users to login."

The same report puts the boundary in Microsoft's own words. Michael Schechter, corporate vice president for search growth and experiences, said: "Copilot Search doesn't require sign in - I'm focused on Bing, so can't speak to Copilot's features."

So Microsoft's AI answers now come in two forms with different front doors.

A Copilot Search answer on a Bing results page stays open to anyone. The Copilot app and website need an account.

The change reaches Bing's home page too, where the Copilot button leads to the same wall. The story was first spotted by Windows Report before Microsoft confirmed it.

For a site owner this is about reach rather than ranking. Every citation Copilot serves now goes to a signed-in user.

The audience is whoever holds a Microsoft, Apple or Google account and chose to sign in.

Nothing about how pages are selected or cited has changed. Microsoft has said nothing about crawling, indexing or the AI visibility reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools.

It also makes the surface harder to measure from outside. Some third-party tools sample AI answers by loading them anonymously.

Those tools can still reach Copilot Search in Bing. They can no longer reach Copilot itself.

Microsoft has published no blog post or help-page note about the sign-in rule. So the only statements on the record are the two quoted above.

This is a sighting, not a Microsoft announcement.

Sachin Patel documented it at Search Engine Watch on 26th Aug with before-and-after screenshots from mobile.

The AI answer at the top of Bing results appeared under an "AI Overview" label. It normally says Copilot.

His own framing keeps the doubt in view: "Whether this is a rebrand test or a simple mislabeling bug isn't clear yet."

Search Engine Roundtable wrote it up the next morning and read it as a test. It noted that "Microsoft is still placing the Copilot logo with the box".

Microsoft has published nothing, and no help page has changed. Its own June wording still calls the surface Copilot Search.

So treat the current name as unchanged until Microsoft says otherwise.

The reason a label test earns a place here is what the label is. Google's product name is "AI Overviews".

If Bing adopted it, the industry shorthand for AI answer boxes would stop separating the two engines. That matters to anyone reporting on "AI Overviews" traffic or citations by name.

Nothing in the sighting suggests the answers themselves changed, only what they are called.

Microsoft expanded the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools with four new views, all "available in preview globally".

Intents classifies the grounding queries behind your citations into intent categories.

Topics groups them into thematic clusters. Compare overlays two time periods of citation activity.

Citation Share is the headline: your site's share of all citations for a query. Microsoft calls it "designed as an observational metric", not a ranking system.

It exposes no competitor domains, no traffic share and no quality scores.

The June post also restates what the report covers: "Microsoft Copilot, Bing, and select partner AI experiences".

For context, Google's Generative AI reports in Search Console, announced thirteen days earlier, carry impressions only. Bing is reporting the citations themselves, with the retrieval queries behind them.