Bing's AI Performance Report: How Indian D2C Brands Finally Measure Their AI Citations

For two years, the advice to D2C brands has been relentless: optimise for AI search, get cited in ChatGPT, win the answer box. What nobody could hand you was a way to check if it was working. You published FAQ-rich pages, added schema, maybe wrote an llms.txt file, and then stared into a void — no impressions, no clicks, no proof that any AI assistant had ever quoted you. That measurement gap is finally closing. Bing Webmaster Tools has launched an AI Performance report that shows, in plain numbers, how often your content gets cited in AI-generated answers on Bing and Copilot (We Are Tenet; Arc Intermedia).

This is a bigger deal than "Bing added a report", because of where those answers travel. ChatGPT's web-grounded responses have leaned heavily on Bing's index — and while OpenAI has been building its own retrieval stack, Bing still supplies a large share of ChatGPT's web citations, which makes Bing's data one of the closest windows most brands have into what AI assistants actually pull from (BrandCited; Search Engine Land). For the first time, a D2C brand in India can stop guessing at answer-engine optimisation and start running it like every other channel: measure, learn, repeat. Here's what the report shows and how to turn it into content that AI keeps citing.

What the report actually measures

The AI Performance report sits inside Bing Webmaster Tools, the same free console you'd use for traditional Bing SEO. Its job is narrow and useful: tell you when AI cited your site as a source, for what, and how that's trending. Five metrics carry the story.

The five numbers that matter

Total citations counts how many times Bing's AI has named your website as a source in generated answers. Average cited pages tracks how many unique pages of yours get cited per day, so you can see whether AI trusts your whole site or just one lucky post. Grounding queries — the most actionable of the set — reveal the prompts and searches that triggered your citations. Page-level citation activity shows exactly which URLs are being cited and how often. And visibility trends over time let you watch the whole picture rise or fall as you change your content (We Are Tenet).

Why grounding queries change the game

Traditional keyword data tells you what people typed. Grounding queries tell you what an AI was answering when it decided your page was worth quoting. That's a different, richer signal. If AI keeps citing your page on "how to remove pilling from wool" while it never touches your product page, that's a map — it's telling you where your authority already lives and where it doesn't. You stop inventing an AEO strategy and start reading one off the data.

Why this matters more than another Bing report

Plenty of marketers wrote Bing off years ago. This report is a reason to reopen the tab, and it has little to do with Bing's own market share.

The index behind the assistants

The value is in what shares Bing's plumbing. ChatGPT's browsing and web answers have drawn heavily on Bing's search index, and Copilot is Microsoft's own assistant built on it. OpenAI has been developing its own retrieval stack too, so it's not purely Bing under the hood — but Bing still grounds a large slice of the AI answers your customers see. So when this report says AI cited your page for a query, it's showing you behaviour from an index that feeds many of those answers, whichever chatbot they opened (BrandCited; Search Engine Land). That makes it a proxy, not a guarantee — but it's the best one publicly available.

From faith to feedback loop

Every other marketing channel you run has a scoreboard. AI visibility didn't — you did the work on faith. This turns it into a loop: publish, see which pages and queries earn citations, strengthen those, and watch the trend line. For a D2C brand, that's the difference between spending on AEO because a blog told you to and spending on it because you can see it returning something.

Bing AI report vs Google's AI reports

They aren't rivals. Google's reports watch how you show up inside Google's own AI features; Bing's watches the Bing-powered assistant world. A brand serious about being found by AI checks both, because customers don't all ask the same machine.

How Indian D2C brands should use it

The setup is quick and the payoff compounds. Treat this as a monthly habit, not a one-off audit.

Step one: verify and read

Verify your domain in Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven't — it's a few minutes and free. Then open the grounding queries and read them like customer research, because that's what they are. You'll usually find AI cites you for informational, problem-solving questions long before it cites your product pages. That list is your content brief, pre-written by the machine you're trying to influence.

Step two: reinforce what already wins

Find the pages pulling the most citations and study their shape — how they answer, how they're structured, where the schema and clear headings sit — then apply that pattern to thinner pages. You're not chasing a theory of what AI likes; you're copying the structure of your own pages that AI has already rewarded. Building that measurement-led content engine, rather than publishing on hope, is the kind of organic growth work our growth marketing team runs for D2C brands who want AI visibility they can actually see.

Step three: fill the query gaps

Where a grounding query is relevant to what you sell but points to a weak page — or none — that's your next piece of content. If AI is answering "is mineral sunscreen safe for daily use" by citing competitors, and you sell mineral sunscreen, you write the better, clearer answer and give the index a stronger source to prefer. Repeat monthly and the trend line tells you whether it's working.

What it won't do

Keep expectations honest. This is measurement, not a magic ranking lever. Citations depend on your content being genuinely useful, well-structured and trustworthy — the report shows you the result, it doesn't manufacture it. It also can't promise a citation on Bing becomes a citation in every assistant; the index overlap is strong but not total. And it won't replace your Google work, where most Indian search still happens. Use it as one instrument on the dashboard, not the whole cockpit.

The takeaway

Answer-engine optimisation spent two years as an act of faith because no one could measure it. Bing's AI Performance report ends that, at least for the Bing-and-Copilot world that grounds so many AI answers. For Indian D2C brands, the play is unglamorous and effective: verify your domain, read the grounding queries as a content brief, reinforce the pages AI already cites, and fill the gaps where it cites someone else. You finally have a scoreboard for AI visibility — the brands that check it monthly will quietly pull ahead of the ones still optimising blind.

Sources: We Are Tenet ("Bing's New AI Performance Data for Webmasters," 2026); Arc Intermedia ("What Bing's AI Citations Mean for Search Visibility in 2026"); BrandCited ("Why ChatGPT Citations Come From Bing, Not Google," 2026); Search Engine Land ("Inside ChatGPT's retrieval stack," 2026). Metric names per Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report as documented in 2026. Bing/Copilot is the report's direct scope; its value as a ChatGPT proxy reflects Bing's large share of ChatGPT's web citations, not an exclusive dependency.