How to get cited by Microsoft Copilot and read the Bing AI Performance report

How does Microsoft Copilot decide which law firm page to cite?

Microsoft Copilot cites pages the Bing search service returns for a short query Copilot writes itself. Microsoft's documentation for web search in Microsoft Copilot says Copilot parses the prompt, generates a search query of a few words, and sends that query to Bing rather than the full prompt. A firm page that Bing has not indexed, or ranks poorly for those few words, is not in the candidate set.

That matters most for business and employment practices, where the person asking is often in-house counsel or an executive working inside Word, Outlook or Teams. Microsoft reported more than 20 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats in its fiscal third quarter of 2026, according to UC Today's April 30, 2026 earnings coverage. Microsoft's own example turns a prompt about a possible acquisition into the Bing query "Fabrikam financials". A general counsel vetting outside counsel produces the same compressed search.

What is a grounding query, and why does it not look like the client's question?

A grounding query is the key phrase Copilot used to retrieve a page it then cited. Microsoft's February 10, 2026 announcement of the AI Performance report defines it that way and says the data is a sample of overall citation activity. Because Copilot compresses the prompt before searching, grounding queries read like keyword strings, not like the anxious sentence a prospective client typed.

Search Influence's first look at its own data, published February 12, 2026, found the same thing: more than 400 unique grounding queries, machine-generated and keyword-dense rather than phrased the way users write. Will Scott, the author, estimated three to five citation events per conversation, so 19,717 citations reflected roughly 4,000 to 6,000 conversations. That is his estimate, not a Microsoft figure, but the caution holds: a citation total counts retrieval events, not people.

Which Bing settings keep a law firm out of Copilot answers?

Five settings decide whether Copilot can use a firm page at all, and three of them are often set by accident. The February 2026 rewrite of the Bing Webmaster Guidelines, reported by Search Engine Journal on February 27, 2026, extended the guidelines to Copilot and grounding results for the first time and spelled out what each directive does to an AI answer. The table reads them for a law firm site.

How should a firm read the AI Performance report without overreading it?

Read it as a list of which pages Copilot uses and on what phrases, not as a score. Microsoft states that total citations do not indicate placement within an answer and that page-level counts show frequency, not importance or ranking. The report carries no click data. A rising line means more retrievals, not more callers.

Concentration and volatility are the two patterns to expect. In Search Influence's 91-day export, from November 12, 2025 to February 10, 2026, one comparison page drew 13,599 of 19,717 citations, or 69%, and the top four pages drew 90%. Daily citations averaged 1,520 in the first week of December and 34 in February, a 97% drop the author was still investigating. A law firm should expect a few pages to carry most of its citations and should compare quarters, not weeks.

How do you turn grounding queries into a page work order?

Export the grounding queries and the page-level citations, put them side by side, and sort every practice page into one of three groups. Microsoft's own guidance in the February 10 announcement says pages cited for specific phrases show clear subject focus, and pages that are indexed but rarely cited are candidates for clarity and completeness work. The sequence below is Firm AEO's typical monthly order.

• •1. Cited for the expected phrase. A Chapter 13 page cited for "chapter 13 attorney [county]" is working. Update it in place and add the next sub-question.
• •2. Cited for an unexpected phrase. A general practice page cited for "non-compete review cost" is a sign Copilot wants a page the firm has not written. Write the single-topic page, since the Bing guidelines say single-topic pages are more likely to be selected for grounding.
• •3. Indexed but never cited. State facts directly in the first lines, use the firm's full name instead of "we", and add a table or FAQ, as Microsoft recommends.
• •4. Notify Bing on every change through IndexNow, which Microsoft names in the same announcement as the way to tell participating engines a page was added or updated.
• •5. Keep Bing Places for Business matched to the website and Google Business Profile, which Microsoft recommends for location-based AI answers.
• •6. Do not chase freshness with new URLs. Ahrefs' July 2025 study put the average age of a page cited by Copilot at 1,056 days, so an older cited page earns more from an update than a replacement.

What can a firm say publicly about being cited by Copilot?

A firm can say what the report shows, dated and described, and nothing more. ABA Model Rule 7.1 prohibits false or misleading communications about a lawyer's services, and a Copilot citation is a retrieval event, not an endorsement. "Recommended by Microsoft Copilot" or "Copilot's top firm" turns a sampled count into an unverifiable claim, and Microsoft's own definitions say the count does not indicate ranking or authority.

The Bing guidelines add two limits of their own. The rewrite renamed keyword stuffing "Keyword Stuffing and Artificially Engineered Language" to cover text written to trigger AI citations, and added a section on prompt injection and AI manipulation. Hidden model instructions and pages stuffed with grounding-query strings are now named abuse. Firm AEO is a marketing company, not a law firm, and the firm's ethics counsel decides what is published about the results.