Bing just gave publishers what Google won't: first-party AI citation data!

For two years, we have been tracking AI citations through third-party tools. We built dashboards. We monitored ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. We helped publishers understand their citation patterns.

But there has been a gap. No search engine was providing first-party data on how their own AI systems cite content.

On February 10, 2026, Microsoft changed that .

They launched the AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools. The first time any major search platform has given publishers direct, first-party data on how AI systems cite their content .

While Google continues to treat AI Overviews as just another impression type buried in Search Console's standard performance reporting, Microsoft built a dedicated dashboard specifically for AI citation tracking .

Here is what the dashboard gives you.

Total citations

How often your content appears as a source in AI-generated answers during a selected time period. This is your primary GEO KPI in Bing .

Average cited pages

The daily average of unique URLs from your site referenced across AI answers. This shows whether your AI visibility is concentrated in a few pages or distributed across your site .

Page-level citation activity

Which specific URLs get cited most often. This is actionable data. You can see exactly which content AI systems consider citation-worthy .

Grounding queries

The key phrases AI systems use when retrieving your content. Important clarification: these are NOT user search queries. They are the AI's internal assessment of what your content is topically about. They reveal how AI systems understand your content positioning .

Visibility trends over time

How citation activity changes across supported AI experiences. Spot patterns, identify content decay, and correlate citation changes with your optimization efforts .

What Bing is building next

At SEO Week in New York, Microsoft previewed four new features coming to the AI Performance dashboard .

Citation Share. The percentage of citations your site captures within a specific grounding query. If ten sources are cited and your site appears three times, your Citation Share is 30 percent. This adds competitive context that raw citation counts cannot provide .

Grounding Query Intent. Queries classified into 15 intent labels. Learning, Informational Search, Navigational, Research, Comparison, Planning, Conversational, Content Filtered. This helps you see visibility across categories instead of individual phrases .

Grounding Query Topic. A second classification layer grouping queries by subject matter. Combined with intent, this gives you a much clearer picture of where you are winning and where you are invisible .

GEO-focused recommendations. Guidance tied to AI visibility. Content structure and crawlability, indexing and canonicalization signals, structured data adoption and quality .

No release dates have been announced. Treat these as previews, not shipped features .

Why this matters for Bing's market position

For the first time in years, Bing has an advantage over Google's Search Console. They are the first search engine to break the AI data boundary and provide users with what the industry has been asking for .

Google includes AI Overviews data within standard Search Console performance reporting. No dedicated AI dashboard. No citation-style URL tracking. No grounding queries. No separate AI trend visualizations .

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI platforms offer publishers zero tools for visibility measurement .

Bing is treating AI citations as a first-class metric with a dedicated reporting infrastructure. Everyone else is either ignoring publisher needs or treating AI visibility as an afterthought.

The critical limitation

The dashboard does not show you clicks. You still have no idea what your click-through rate is from AI search results .

Microsoft acknowledges this. They note that a decline in clicks does not always mean visibility has dropped, since content may now surface as citations or grounding references in Copilot .

Bing recommends tracking impressions and citation eligibility rather than relying solely on click data .

How Rankfender fits in

We track citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI systems. RAIVE monitors where your brand appears. RCGE generates content that AI actually wants to cite.

The Bing dashboard is first-party data for Microsoft's ecosystem. It is valuable. It is also limited to Bing.

You still need third-party tracking to understand your visibility across the entire AI landscape.

What I am curious about

Have you accessed the AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools yet? What did you learn about your content that surprised you?

Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender