In contrast to conventional SEO, AI search lacks native efficiency reporting to assist companies develop natural visibility methods.
Google’s Search Console combines AI Overviews and natural listings in its “Efficiency” part, leaving optimizers to guess which channel drove visibility and site visitors. ChatGPT shares metrics solely with publishers which have licensed their content material to OpenAI.
Bing is the primary platform to supply some transparency. A number of weeks after publishing its “information to AEO and GEO,” Bing launched an “AI Efficiency Report” in Webmaster Instruments.
AI Efficiency
The brand new report tracks citations in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and choose AI associate integrations. However there’s no choice to filter by a single floor, and no technique to determine the mixing companions or their function.
The report exhibits customers’ “Complete Citations” for the chosen interval and “Avg. Cited Pages.” It then lists:
- “Grounding Queries,” that are “the important thing phrases the AI used when retrieving content material that was cited in its reply.” In different phrases, the queries are the “fan-out” phrases that Bing’s AI brokers use to seek for and discover solutions, although we don’t know which engines like google or platforms they entry.
- “Pages,” the URLs talked about in AI solutions.
The brand new Webmaster Instruments part lists citations by “Grounding Queries” and “Pages.” Click on picture to enlarge.
Every tab contains extra visibility knowledge:
- For each Grounding Question, Webmaster Instruments stories on the typical variety of distinctive pages cited per day in AI solutions.
- For every cited URL, the report contains its frequency — how typically it seems in a solution — not its significance, rating, or position inside a response.
The report offers no site visitors or click-through knowledge and no readability into which Grounding Queries triggered which citations.
Utilizing the Information
The report is an efficient first step, nevertheless it provides little actionable knowledge. Maybe it’ll drive different gamers to do extra.
In line with Bing, the brand new report:
… exhibits how your website’s content material is utilized in AI‑generated solutions throughout Microsoft Copilot and associate experiences by highlighting which pages are cited, how visibility traits change over time, and the grounding queries related together with your content material.
I’m making the report extra helpful by:
- Researching natural key phrases on Bing and Google that drive site visitors to the cited URLs,
- Prompting ChatGPT or Gemini to show the key phrases into prompts,
- Evaluating whether or not the cited pages tackle these prompts or want higher construction or readability.
Additionally, I determine widespread modifiers within the grounding queries to know how AI brokers discover the pages.
Determine widespread modifiers, reminiscent of “virus” on this instance, to know how AI brokers discover your pages.
Webmaster Instruments
Organising Bing Webmaster Instruments takes solely a few minutes with Search Console enabled.
Log in to Webmaster Instruments together with your Microsoft account, click on “Add website,” and select the “Import your websites from GSC” possibility. Enable roughly 24 hours for Bing to gather and report the information.
