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.

This is a sighting, not a Microsoft announcement.

Sachin Patel reported it at Search Engine Watch on 31st Aug with a screenshot. He wrote: "Bing is now testing sponsored results within its AI Overview/Copilot results."

He called it "the first time we've seen sponsored results appear directly within Bing's Copilot results". A note dated 1st Sep says he saw "more examples", and a later undated note says the box now shows "shopping ads".

On 29th Oct Khushal Bherwani posted a second screenshot on X: "Bing is showing Sponsored Results within AI Overviews."

Search Engine Roundtable wrote it up on 30th Oct. Barry Schwartz said he "personally still cannot trigger them".

Neither observer names a market, a query type or an ad format. Microsoft has not commented on either sighting.

Microsoft's April post did promise ads "on AI surfaces like Copilot Search and Copilot Answers" from May. Nobody has said whether these sponsored results are that programme.

"AI Overview" is the label Bing was seen testing on 26th Aug. Both observers use it for the same answer box.

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.

Ten months after retiring the Bing Search APIs, Microsoft announced their strategic successor: "a suite of AI-native grounding APIs built for the agentic era".

The framing is the story.

"Web IQ is a search engine for AI systems. Where Bing was built to help people search the web, Web IQ is built to help AI agents find the right information, turn it into useful evidence, and use it inside reasoning."

Instead of ranked blue links, Web IQ returns passage-level "structured evidence objects". Microsoft claims sub-165ms p95 latency, measured in its own internal comparisons.

So treat the number as a vendor claim.

For site owners, the post says Web IQ honors robots exclusion protocols and publisher controls. It also says Microsoft is engaging the IETF on AI-era standards for the open web.

Availability is the main caveat. The post ships no product, no pricing and no dates, only an interest form.

Anything you may read about specific preview regions is not in Microsoft's post.

Microsoft ended its named AI browser experiment: "As part of today's update, we're retiring Copilot Mode. With helpful features built directly into Edge, it's now simpler to shape how you browse and get more done."

The features survive the label. Multi-tab reasoning, history-informed answers, memory, Vision and Voice move into default Edge on desktop and mobile.

So do Journeys, Study and Learn, the writing assistant and podcast generation. Some features are gated by market.

The lifecycle: launched 28th Jul 2025 as an opt-in experiment on Windows and Mac. Upgraded in the October Fall Release, retired 13th May 2026.

AI browsers kept churning across the industry; OpenAI's Atlas lasted 292 days.

The same day, Bing published a separate essay on keeping trusted sources visible inside AI answers. The essay is "Keeping Trusted Content Visible in an AI-Powered Search World".

It lists risk detection at query level, public-service announcements and SafeSearch modes.

At its Activate event, Microsoft Advertising announced AI Max for Search campaigns, "available in open pilot in May". They bring expanded query matching, asset personalization and URL routing "to deliver relevant ads on AI surfaces like Copilot Search and Copilot Answers".

Offer Highlights are product-detail ads shown in Copilot, Edge and Bing. They became available for retail in English-speaking markets, with Best Buy first.

Copilot Checkout grew in the same post. The catalog was "deepening" to more than 500,000 merchants, and reach extended to Copilot's mobile apps.

Target loyalty accounts became linkable. Brand Agents expanded from Shopify to WooCommerce.

Microsoft also published striking agent-traffic figures. Automated traffic is growing 8x faster than human traffic, and AI-driven sessions nearly tripled in 2025.

Agentic browser traffic is up roughly 8,000% year over year. All are Microsoft's own internal figures, footnoted as such.

So read them as a vendor's claims about its own products rather than market facts.

Bing Webmaster Tools gained a new set of insights "that shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations".

The metrics are Total Citations, Average Cited Pages and Grounding Queries. Two more cover page-level citation activity and visibility trends over time.

Average Cited Pages is a daily average of unique pages surfaced as sources. Grounding Queries are the retrieval phrases behind the citations.

Microsoft's own framing sets the direction: "This release is an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools, helping publishers understand how their content participates in AI-driven experiences."

Two days later, Jordi Ribas, CVP of Search and AI, published a strategy essay. It claims that "Microsoft grounding powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market".

That is Microsoft describing Microsoft, but it explains why the report exists.

Citations are the currency Bing wants to be measured in.

The contrast with Google defines this beat. Google's Search Console Generative AI reports arrived four months later, on 3rd Jun 2026.

They carry impressions only, with no citations and no queries.

Announced during NRF week, Copilot Checkout "is beginning to roll out in the U.S. on Copilot.com, with partner activation across PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe".

The enrollment default matters for merchants: "Shopify merchants will be automatically enrolled following an opt-out window."

Launch retailers included Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Ashley Furniture, plus Etsy sellers' items. The merchant, not Microsoft, remains the merchant of record.

Brand Agents launched alongside: on-site chat agents for Shopify merchants, joined through a Microsoft Clarity waitlist. Mastercard and Visa were named as future agentic-payments partners.

Microsoft's pitch numbers are its own. Journeys that include Copilot led to 53% more purchases within 30 minutes.

With shopping intent present, purchase likelihood was 194% higher. Both come from Microsoft internal data, so attribute accordingly.

As of August 2026 we have found no market beyond the US. That makes the US-only gate the row to watch on this page's availability tracker.