Microsoft Copilot is available as a standalone app on the web, on smartphones, and for Windows and Mac; on new Windows 11 PCs, the app usually comes preinstalled. Copilot is also built into the Edge browser and into Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. For many people, Copilot is therefore right where they already work, and they can also ask it about providers, products, or solutions. Whether and how your business appears in its answers is part of your AI visibility.

Microsoft introduced the assistant in February 2023 as a chat feature in Bing and Edge, known as Bing Chat; in November 2023, it was renamed Copilot. Microsoft’s Copilot offering for work accounts, most recently called Microsoft 365 Copilot, has also been named Microsoft Copilot since August 2026. That same month, Microsoft began bringing personal and work use together in one app, in which personal and work accounts remain separate. According to Microsoft, Copilot uses language models from Microsoft, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT), and other developers. Copilot Search, an AI answer experience Microsoft introduced in Bing in April 2025, is a separate product.

How Copilot draws on web content

Copilot can answer a question from what its language models learned in training. According to Microsoft, Copilot determines for each request whether it needs content from the web. If so, Copilot works as a generative engine: it bases its answer on current web content, which Microsoft calls grounding, and lists the websites it used as linked sources below the text. Such links are AI citations; when Copilot names a business without a link, that is a mention. Microsoft also points out that Copilot can make mistakes and produce information that sounds plausible but is false, known as hallucinations.

For Copilot with work accounts, Microsoft describes in detail where the web content comes from: Copilot identifies the terms in a question where information from the web would improve the answer and derives a short query of a few words from them, or several for some questions (query fan-out). Copilot sends these queries to Bing; it includes the full question only if the question is very short. Copilot then writes the answer using the content Bing returns. In Copilot Chat, a Microsoft chat offering for work accounts, the exact queries sent to Bing appear alongside the linked sources.

Bing as the foundation

According to Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines, Bing and Copilot rely on the same crawling and indexing. The guidelines explicitly cover Copilot as well as web content that Bing supplies to other AI applications through its APIs. A page that Bing does not know cannot be supplied to Copilot as a source: Bingbot, Bing’s crawler, first has to reach it, and Bing has to include it in its index. Microsoft therefore advises against blocking Bingbot in a site’s robots.txt file. Beyond robots.txt, whether Bingbot can find and fetch a page depends on further factors that together make up a website’s crawlability.

Microsoft also names several settings for individual pages or passages that affect Copilot. For a whole page, they go into its source code as a robots meta tag or into its HTTP header; data-nosnippet, by contrast, is an attribute that marks individual passages:

  • noindex: The page appears neither in Bing nor in Copilot nor in the web content Bing supplies to other AI applications.
  • noarchive: Copilot does not use the page’s content for its answers.
  • nocache: Copilot uses only the page’s URL, title, and snippet. According to Microsoft, this makes citations less detailed and lowers answer quality.
  • nosnippet and data-nosnippet: Bing shows no text excerpts from the page or the marked passage; according to Microsoft, this can also limit the quality of citations in Copilot.

These settings are intended for content that should deliberately be kept out of Copilot or limited there. On pages meant to serve as sources, it’s worth checking that none of them was set by accident.

Measuring citations

How often a website’s pages are cited as sources in Copilot is shown in the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, Microsoft’s tool for website owners; the report combines citations from Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. In its Webmaster Guidelines, Microsoft also notes that content can appear as a citation in Copilot without anyone clicking on it. Fewer clicks therefore do not necessarily mean less visibility.