Guides · Updated October 23, 2026

How to Get Your Brand Recommended by Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot sits in Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365, so a lot of buyers ask it for recommendations without ever opening a separate AI app. When it answers a question like “best [your category] for [their situation]”, it usually searches the web first and cites the pages it used. Those pages come from Bing.

The short version: make sure Bing can find and index your key pages, don’t block Copilot by accident with a noarchive tag, tell Bing quickly when pages change, answer buyers’ questions in plain text, and get named on the third-party pages Bing ranks for your category. Then measure, because Copilot’s answers are not the same as ChatGPT’s.

How Copilot builds an answer

Microsoft describes the web part of Copilot plainly (Microsoft Learn):

• It writes its own short search. Copilot picks out the terms where web information would help, generates a search query of a few words, and sends it to the Bing search service. The query isn’t the buyer’s full prompt.
• It answers from what Bing returns. The Bing results are used to compose the response, and Copilot Chat shows the sources and the exact search queries it used.
• Bing’s rules apply. Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines say they cover how content is discovered, crawled, indexed and surfaced across Bing search, Copilot and grounding results, and that following them helps make pages eligible for grounding results and citations (Bing Webmaster Guidelines).

So getting recommended by Copilot is mostly about Bing: being in its index, being fresh, and being on the pages it ranks for the short queries Copilot writes.

Step 1: Ask Copilot your buyers’ questions

• Write 5–10 questions a real buyer would ask, without your brand name: “best X for Y,” “X vs Y,” “alternatives to [category leader],” and one long, specific question.
• Ask each one in Copilot in a fresh conversation. Note whether you’re named, in what position, how you’re described, which competitors appear, and every cited source.
• Open the sources. In Copilot Chat you can also see the exact search query Copilot sent to Bing. Search that short query on Bing yourself: the pages ranking there are the pool Copilot picks from.

Step 2: Make sure Bing can find and index your pages

Bing lists four ways it discovers URLs: IndexNow, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and links from relevant sites (Bing Webmaster Guidelines). Check:

1. Bingbot isn’t blocked in robots.txt or by a CDN or hosting “bot protection” setting. If Bing can’t crawl a page, it can’t cite it.
2. Your key pages are indexed. Search site:yourdomain.com on Bing, or use URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools. Homepage, pricing, features, comparison and use-case pages should all be there.
3. A clean XML sitemap lists only canonical URLs, is referenced in robots.txt, and has an accurate lastmod for each page. Bing says lastmod helps it decide what to recrawl, and that you shouldn’t set it to the time the sitemap was generated unless the page really changed (Bing Webmaster Blog).
4. Real text in the HTML. Product name, who it’s for and pricing should be readable without running scripts.

Step 3: Check for the noarchive trap

This is the Copilot-specific mistake. Bing uses two robots meta values to control use in Chat and Copilot (Bing robots meta tags, Bing Webmaster Blog):

• noarchive: the page won’t be included in Chat and Copilot answers or linked from them (and won’t be used to train Microsoft’s foundation models).
• nocache: the page may be included, but only its URL, title and snippet are shown. If a page has both tags, Bing treats it as nocache.
• No tag: no action is needed to stay eligible.

Both tags leave you in normal Bing results, which is why a leftover noarchive, often added years ago to stop cached copies, can quietly keep you out of Copilot. Check the robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag header on your key pages. Remove it unless you chose it on purpose.

Step 4: Tell Bing when pages change

Bing asks site owners to use IndexNow when URLs are added, updated or removed, and says timely notifications help it reduce outdated or incorrect URL references in Copilot responses (Bing Webmaster Guidelines). Many platforms support it, or you can send a simple request from your own code (IndexNow; see our tip on telling search engines with IndexNow). Ping it whenever you change pricing, launch a feature or publish a new comparison page, so Copilot doesn’t quote last year’s plan.

Step 5: Answer the questions, then get named elsewhere

• One clear page per use case or audience, with the buyer’s question as a heading and a direct answer in the first sentence or two.
• Pricing and limits in plain text, including what’s free. Keep it current; Bing’s guidelines ask you to update or remove outdated information.
• Honest comparison pages that say when the other product is the better fit.
• Get onto the pages Copilot cites. Go back to the sources from Step 1 and mark the roundups, reviews, directories and forum threads that name competitors but not you. Send authors facts they can verify, complete your listings, and ask real customers for reviews. Never write or buy reviews.
• Evidence beats keywords. In the GEO study from Princeton and IIT Delhi researchers (KDD 2024), adding citations, quotations and statistics made sources more visible in generative engine answers, while keyword stuffing did little (Aggarwal et al.). It’s a research result, not a guarantee, and it didn’t test Copilot specifically.

Step 6: Measure on a schedule

Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, that shows how often your content is cited in Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations: total citations, which URLs were cited, the grounding queries used, and trends over time (Bing Webmaster Blog). It’s a rare first-party look at AI citations (our daily tip Is Microsoft Copilot citing your site? walks through it). It doesn’t show clicks or the answer text, so keep re-asking your buyer questions in Copilot weekly or monthly and compare:

• How many questions name you, and in what position
• Whether the description is accurate and current
• Which pages are cited, and whether your target third-party pages have started naming you

Common mistakes

• Only checking Google. Copilot answers from Bing’s index. A page that ranks on Google can still be missing from Bing.
• A leftover noarchive on pages you want Copilot to cite.
• A stale sitemap with redirected URLs or a lastmod that changes on every build.
• Testing with your brand name in the question. “Is [Brand] good?” doesn’t show whether Copilot recommends you to someone who hasn’t heard of you.
• Judging from one answer. Answers vary between runs and between assistants.

FAQ

Sources

• Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• Bing, “Robots meta tags and attributes that Bing supports”
• Bing Webmaster Blog, “Announcing new options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat” (September 2023)
• Bing Webmaster Blog, “Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview” (February 10, 2026)
• Bing Webmaster Blog, “Keeping Content Discoverable with Sitemaps in AI Powered Search” (July 31, 2025)
• Microsoft Learn, “Data, privacy, and security for web search in Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Copilot Chat”
• IndexNow
• Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” KDD 2024
• WhatTheBotSaid check data: one internal check of Cal.com, 20 answers and 76 cited links, as of October 22, 2026