AI Performance — Bing Webmaster Tools' AI citation report

Microsoft announced the four capabilities on June 16, 2026, in preview. Intents classifies the grounding queries behind AI answers into categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation and Local. Topics groups related grounding queries into thematic clusters. Citation Share reports the percentage of citations attributed to a site out of all citations shown across all sites for the same grounding query. Compare overlays a previous period on the current view so citation activity can be read over time.

The report is organised around grounding queries — the searches the engine runs in the background to assemble an answer — rather than the prompts people type. That is why a site can hold citation share for questions it never ranked for, and why the Intents and Topics views exist: they describe demand at the layer where the engine actually retrieves.

The contrast with Google's console is the reason the report matters. Search Console's generative-AI performance report, introduced in June 2026 and available to all sites since August 31, shows impressions across AI Overviews and AI Mode without click data, and names no query. Bing's report names the query, its intent and the site's share of citations for it. Third-party tools estimate all three by sampling prompts at scale; this is the one place an engine publishes them itself.

What the record does not hold: any comparison of Bing's first-party numbers with third-party estimates for the same site, any measure of Bing's own share of AI answers, and any first-party equivalent from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity.