Bing Webmaster Tools adds topic-level AI citation data, and shows exactly where rivals get cited and you don't

Bing Webmaster Tools added a beta feature on October 13 that groups a site's AI citations into topics, and for the first time shows which queries inside each topic cite a competitor instead of you. The feature, called Topics Portfolio, lives inside the AI Performance report that tracks how often a site gets referenced inside Copilot answers and the Bing summaries that sit above search results. Microsoft's Bing Webmaster team, Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam and Vivek Jain, introduced it as the first release in that report to use ecosystem-wide data rather than a site's own activity alone, according to their announcement as covered by Search Engine Roundtable and PPC Land.

What the report actually shows

A new tab sits next to the existing Citations & Pages view. It clusters the "grounding queries" that feed Copilot and Bing's AI summaries into broad themes, Microsoft's examples being football, taxes or AI chatbots, and scores each one on three figures: Topic Size (the approximate total citations across every site for that topic), Sites Cited (roughly how many sites get cited in it) and Queries (the approximate number of distinct queries inside it). Clicking a topic opens a detail page with two tables, one for queries where your own site is already cited and a second, new one called Top Opportunity Queries, listing the strongest queries in your portfolio where other sites get cited and yours does not.

The access gate matters: Microsoft shows the tab only when it judges there is "sufficient data" for a site, per Search Engine Journal's reporting, with no published threshold. Smaller software vendors may see a short list of topics, or none. Date ranges run one, two or three months, and the feature follows an AI Performance report that only reached public preview in February and added query-and-page linking in March, so Topics Portfolio is still an early layer on young infrastructure.

Why the numbers come with an asterisk

Every figure in the new tab is an estimate presented as a range rather than a count, and Microsoft's own framing says to treat them that way: "Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger," the company wrote, as quoted by Search Engine Journal. Topic classification is done by an unnamed AI model and can misfire. Opportunity queries can surface a competitor's own branded terms, which look like a gap but are not one, and Microsoft offers no filter to strip them out. Sites Cited tells you a topic is crowded but never names who is winning it.

There is also a scope problem independent of accuracy. Bing holds a low single-digit share of search volume, so a gap the tool surfaces reflects demand on Bing's own AI surfaces only, not on ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode or Perplexity, where most software buyers researching a purchase are more likely to be. And unlike the paid AI-visibility trackers this report partly displaces, it carries no click data at all, only citation counts.

What a software marketer should do

Treat Topics Portfolio as a free, narrow second opinion, not a dashboard of record. If your product already has pages in Bing Webmaster Tools, the Opportunity Queries list is worth ten minutes a month: it points at specific phrases, not vague topics, which is more than most AI-visibility tools hand you for nothing.

• Open the AI Performance report and check whether the Topics Portfolio tab has appeared yet; if it hasn't, your site likely doesn't have enough Bing citation volume to matter here regardless.
• Scan Top Opportunity Queries for competitor brand names before acting on any of them, since Microsoft ships no filter for that noise.
• Cross-check any gap that looks real against your own analytics for Bing-referred traffic before commissioning content to chase it.
• Keep Google Search Console's AI impression reports, not this beta, as the primary source for AI-citation volume, since Bing's numbers cover a fraction of where software buyers actually search.

Who this affects, and who it doesn't

It matters most to software vendors who already lean on Bing Webmaster Tools for technical SEO and have enough indexed, cited content to clear Microsoft's undisclosed data threshold. It matters least to early-stage SaaS companies with thin content footprints, who are unlikely to see the tab populate at all, and to any team whose buyers research primarily through Google or through ChatGPT's consumer app rather than Copilot or Bing's own surfaces. For most B2B software marketers, that means this is a supplementary check, not a new system of record, until Microsoft either names its classification model, publishes a data threshold, or extends coverage past citations into clicks.