Bing’s New AI Visibility Insights: Intents, Topics, Citation Share & Compare

Bing just gave you X-ray vision into AI search. Here's what its new Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare reports actually show, and how to use them.

Microsoft just shipped one of the most useful updates for GEO practitioners this year. On June 16, 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools launched four new AI performance capabilities in public preview: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare — together making up Bing’s new AI visibility insights.

If you’ve been optimizing for AI search — Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot — this update gives you the first real data-driven toolkit for understanding how and why your content actually gets cited in AI-generated answers, rather than guessing.

What Are Bing’s New AI Visibility Insights?

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced the AI Performance Report inside Bing Webmaster Tools — a dashboard showing how your content appears in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing Chat, and partner AI experiences. The new update expands that foundation with four capabilities, each answering a different question about your AI visibility.

1. Intents — Understanding the “Why” Behind AI Citations

Until now, you could see which queries triggered AI citations for your content, but a query alone only tells part of the story. Intents classifies your grounding queries into broader categories — informational (“what is solar energy?”), commercial (“best solar panels for homes 2026”), navigational, learn-and-solve, research, creation, and local. If you’re an e-commerce site with strong visibility in comparison-oriented queries, your product content is working. If you’re cited mostly for informational queries but want commercial-intent traffic, that’s a clear content gap to fill.

2. Topics — Seeing Your AI Visibility Thematically

AI systems reason across concepts and themes rather than isolated keywords. Topics groups related grounding queries into broader thematic clusters — “solar panels,” “solar energy efficiency,” and “residential solar installation” would all map into a single “Solar Energy” topic, showing your total AI visibility for that theme. This is topical authority measurement built for the AI era: it helps you spot where you’re already strong and where your topical coverage has gaps.

3. Citation Share — Your Share of the AI Citation Space

This is arguably the most powerful of the four metrics. Citation Share shows the percentage of citations your site receives out of all citations shown for a specific grounding query — effectively “share of voice” for AI-generated answers. If an AI answer cites five sources for a query and your site is cited twice, your Citation Share is 40%. It’s an observational metric: it doesn’t expose competitor domains or assign quality scores, and citation patterns can shift due to model updates, freshness signals, or competing content.

4. Compare — Tracking Changes Over Time

Compare lets you overlay a previous time period directly onto the current reporting view — the current 30 days against the prior 30, or a custom range. Without time-based comparison you’re flying blind on whether a content update actually improved your AI citations, or whether a competitor’s new content quietly ate into your Citation Share.

What This Means for Your GEO Strategy

Start by auditing your current AI visibility: log into Bing Webmaster Tools, open the AI Performance section, and explore all four features, starting with Topics to understand your thematic authority before drilling into Intents for query context. Use Intents to find content gaps — if you’re strong on informational queries but weak on commercial intent, that’s a signal to build comparison guides and product-focused content. Use Topics to identify and double down on the thematic clusters where you already have authority. Then set a monthly review cadence with Compare to track whether your Citation Share is rising or declining for the topics that matter most.

How This Fits the Broader AI Search Shift

Bing’s AI visibility insights are part of a wider pattern: every major platform is building AI-specific analytics. Google is expanding AI Overviews and structured data support; Chrome’s Lighthouse now includes an Agentic Browsing audit scoring websites on AI-agent readiness (more on that in our content marketing trends piece); and Microsoft is currently leading with the most transparent AI citation analytics of the three. The publishers who win from here treat AI visibility as a first-class metric alongside traditional organic rankings, not an afterthought.

Getting Started

Go to Bing Webmaster Tools, verify your site if you haven’t already, navigate to the AI Performance section, and explore the Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare tabs. Microsoft has also added an in-app feedback feature if you want to flag issues directly to their team.

Final Thoughts

Data beats guessing. For the first time, you can see not just whether AI engines cite you, but why, on what themes, at what share, and whether that share is moving in the right direction. That’s a meaningfully better starting point for any GEO strategy than the content marketing trends piece we published last week.

Want help building a GEO measurement plan around these new reports? Get in touch or read more on the about page.

Written by mootkur9

17 years in digital marketing. Founder of Sadhyam. Writing about AI search, AEO/GEO, and the agentic web. More about me →