Microsoft is now officially releasing a preview of the new AI performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools that now includes Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare. We saw Microsoft demo these features in late April but now it is actually starting to roll out to users.
As a reminder, Bing officially rolled out its AI performance report in February. Google didn’t roll out its AI reporting in Search Console until June, and it seemed forced.
What is new. “These new capabilities build on that foundation by helping publishers better understand why their content is being surfaced, which broader subject areas they are gaining visibility in, how their presence evolves relative to other cited sources, and how citation patterns change over time,” wrote Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft.
Intent: The new Intents feature in Bing Webmaster Tools now classifies the grounding queries in the AI Performance Report in broader categories, such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local, and more. This in a sense helps you understand the intent behind the prompt or query. “This helps publishers move beyond simply seeing which queries triggered citations and begin understanding the broader query context our systems associate with those citation appearances,” Krishna Madhavan wrote.
The example provided was that an e-commerce publisher may discover strong visibility in comparison-oriented or shopping-focused AI experiences, while an educational publisher may find that their content is frequently surfaced in research or learning-oriented interactions. These insights can help publishers better align content structure and depth with the types of experiences where AI systems are surfacing their content.
Topics: The Topics in the AI performance reports group related grounding queries into broader thematic clusters. AI systems reason across concepts and themes rather than isolated keywords, Microsoft explained. So by having topics, it will help publishers understand visibility in the same thematic structure that modern AI systems use to organize information.
So for example, queries such as “solar panels,” “solar energy efficiency,” and “residential solar installation,” for example, may all map into a broader topic cluster like Solar Energy. “This creates a more natural way to analyze AI visibility. Content teams and publishers often think in terms of themes, editorial areas, and audience interests rather than isolated keywords. Topics help bridge that gap by turning grounding query data into a more thematic view of AI engagement,” Microsoft wrote.
One note, “during the preview phase, some labels may still be broad – especially for highly specialized or niche domains – but the system is already beginning to reveal meaningful thematic patterns,” Microsoft wrote.
Citations. Microsoft also added citation share, which shows how much of the citation space your site receives for a specific grounding query. Citation share is calculated as the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query. “This helps publishers understand not just whether they were cited, but how much visibility they received within the full set of cited sources for that query,” Microsoft explained.
Microsoft added these points:
- “This can provide a more directional view into how visibility is evolving over time. Publishers may begin to identify areas where their content has strong and growing representation in AI-generated experiences, as well as areas where visibility may be more fragmented across many sources.”
- “Importantly, Citation Share is designed as an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content.”
- “AI citation ecosystems are inherently dynamic. Citation patterns can shift due to changes in user behavior, evolving models, freshness signals, partner refresh cycles, and broader changes across the web itself.”
Compare. With all of that, you can also compare the changes over time. The compare feature allows you to overlay a previous time period directly onto the current reporting view.
“Compare is designed to help publishers observe changes over time. Citation activity can be influenced by many factors including evolving AI models, competing content, freshness signals, and shifts in user demand,” Microsoft wrote.
Here is what it looks like:
Why we care. While we still do not have click and click-through rate data, Microsoft keeps adding more and more to its AI performance reports.
I am hopful that one day we will get click data, but I am still not expecting to see that from Google or Microsoft any time soon.
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