How to get cited by Microsoft Copilot.

By GorillaSEO · October 2026 · 9 min read

Why Copilot is a different surface

Most AI visibility advice treats every engine as the same job. Copilot is not. Three things make it its own surface. First, the retrieval layer: Copilot answers from Bing's index, so a page that exists only in Google's world is invisible here. Second, the Microsoft graph: Copilot can draw on LinkedIn company information in a way other engines do not, which makes a complete, accurate company page part of the work rather than a nice extra. Third, the measurement: Bing Webmaster Tools has a free AI Performance report that shows which of your pages are already being cited and which queries return nothing from your domain. No other major engine gives you that first-party view for free. Treat Copilot as a separate surface with its own setup, and the rest of this guide follows naturally.

Step 1: Get into Bing's index properly

Nothing else in this guide matters if Bing cannot see your pages. Open Bing Webmaster Tools, verify your site, and submit your sitemap. Then turn on IndexNow — it is an open protocol that tells Bing the moment you publish, update or delete a page, so indexing happens in minutes or hours instead of days, and Cloudflare supports it with a simple toggle. While you are there, check two quiet blockers: your robots.txt must not block Bingbot, and your key pages must render as finished HTML rather than JavaScript-assembled shells that some crawlers never fully read. Finally, open the AI Performance report and record your baseline: which pages, if any, are already cited, and which buyer queries return nothing from you. That baseline is what every later check gets compared against. If you have never checked whether a search engine sees your site at all, our guide to checking indexation covers the Google side of the same habit.

Step 2: Write pages Copilot can lift

Copilot cites pages it can trust and lift a clean answer from. That means structure, not tricks. Lead each important page with the answer in the first paragraph, in plain words, before any background. Shape headings as the questions buyers actually ask — "how much does X cost", "which X is right for Y" — rather than as clever labels. Show clear authorship and current dates, and keep the page fresh: a page that has not changed in two years reads as stale to a system choosing what to quote today. Cut anything that makes extraction hard: answers buried in images, key facts locked inside PDFs, and pages that only make sense after reading three other pages. One page per question, answered directly, beats one long page that answers everything vaguely. This is the same discipline behind our Perplexity guide — different engine, same rule: make the answer easy to lift.

Step 3: Add the schema that helps extraction

Schema does not buy a citation, but it makes a page much easier to parse correctly. Three types cover most of the value. FAQPage for question-and-answer content, marked up to match the visible text word for word, so Copilot can take a Q&A pair without guessing at the structure. Article for blog posts and guides, carrying the headline, author and publish date. Organization — and LocalBusiness for a real service address — for the entity facts: name, website, service area, contact details. Keep the markup honest and in sync with what the page actually shows; markup that contradicts the visible page is worse than no markup at all. If your pages already carry FAQ schema from earlier work, this step is mostly verification, not a rebuild.

Step 4: Fix the LinkedIn piece

This is the step most Copilot guides skip, and it is specific to this engine. Copilot's Microsoft side means your LinkedIn company page is part of your citation profile, not a separate social chore. Complete it properly: the right industry classification, a plain description of what you do and who you serve, a consistent name and website, and regular activity rather than a page created once and abandoned. It takes under an hour and needs no content creation. A half-empty or out-of-date company page does not just look bad to humans — it gives Copilot thinner, older material to work with when your business comes up. Do this step even if you do nothing else on this list.

Step 5: Test with real prompts, and log it

You cannot manage what you do not measure, and Copilot gives you two ways to measure. First, the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools — check it monthly for newly cited pages and for queries where competitors appear and you do not. Second, your own prompt tests: write ten to fifteen questions in the words a buyer would actually use — service plus city, price questions, "who should I use for X", and one or two competitor comparisons. Run each prompt directly in Copilot, twice, in fresh sessions, and log the date, the prompt, whether you were mentioned, whether your site was cited, and which competitors were named instead. AI answers vary between runs, so a single test proves nothing; two runs of the same prompt, a month apart, show direction. Fifteen questions take about half an hour. Our GEO prompt guide gives you the same testing habit for ChatGPT and Perplexity — run the Copilot set alongside it and you get one picture across all three engines.

What will not work

Four things waste money here. Paying for placement: citation placement is not purchasable, and labelled sponsored slots are ads, not citations — anyone selling guaranteed Copilot placement is selling something that does not exist. Google-only SEO: if your pages are not in Bing's index, no amount of Google ranking helps here. "Submit to Copilot" forms and tools: there is no submission channel; the route is Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow. And keyword stuffing or fake reviews: they do not survive a system that weighs trust, and review manipulation risks the profile itself. The honest version is less exciting and it is the only one that works: be in the index, be quotable, be consistent everywhere you appear, and keep checking.

How long it takes

Set expectations in three parts. Indexing: once crawl access is clean and IndexNow is on, a submitted page can appear in Bing's index within days. Citations: these move over weeks, not days, and steadier volume comes after a quarter of consistent publishing and checking. Correction: if Copilot currently says something wrong about your business, fixing it is slower than filling a gap, because you are changing what the system believes rather than adding to it. Re-test your prompt set every four to six weeks. If nothing has moved after a quarter, the problem is usually not effort — it is one of the earlier steps: a page missing from Bing, a blocked crawler, or content that never states the answer plainly. Fix that step before adding more content.

Want the human version?

If you would rather not run this yourself, our AI Search Optimization work covers Copilot alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI — Bing setup, answer-first pages, schema and monthly prompt testing — inside our wider LLM SEO services. Start with a free audit: we’ll check whether Bing sees your site at all, and what Copilot currently says about your business.