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Coaley Peak GEO Research Centre Engine guide

Microsoft Copilot and Bing How Microsoft's assistant grounds its answers in Bing, and how to be its source.

Microsoft Copilot began as Bing Chat in February 2023 and is now Microsoft's AI assistant across Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365. Its web-grounded answers come from Bing's index, so Bing SEO is Copilot SEO. This guide covers its timeline, the four layers behind its answers, Bing's crawlers and Microsoft's controls.

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Independent guide: Coaley Peak is not associated with Microsoft Corporation. Trademarks

Owner
Microsoft Corporation
Launched
February 2023 as Bing Chat; renamed Copilot November 2023
Home market
More than 170 markets, not mainland China
Languages
43 language variants; voice in 64 languages
Open weights
No
Crawlers
bingbot; there is no separate Copilot crawler

Overview

What Microsoft Copilot and Bing is, and who uses it

Microsoft launched 'the new Bing' and Edge with an AI chat, Bing Chat, on 7 February 2023. It announced Microsoft Copilot as an 'everyday AI companion' that September, and at Ignite in November 2023 Bing Chat simply became Copilot. A redesigned consumer Copilot with voice followed in October 2024, and Copilot Search in Bing, blending classic and generative results, in April 2025.

Microsoft says Copilot is available in more than 170 markets, though not mainland China or embargoed markets, and supports 43 language variants for personal accounts. It said in January 2026 that its Copilot apps had 150 million monthly active users, commercial and consumer combined. From August 2026 the consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps are being merged into one Microsoft Copilot app.

Copilot uses models from Microsoft, OpenAI and others, and Microsoft AI now builds its own MAI models. But for site owners the decisive fact is retrieval: Copilot sends a short query to Bing and centres its answer on high-ranking web content. There is no separate Copilot crawler.

Bing has made Copilot more measurable than most assistants. Its February 2026 Webmaster Guidelines set out how Copilot uses content, give NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE Copilot-specific meanings and list GEO abuses, and Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows how often a site is cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers, and for which queries.

Timeline

Microsoft Copilot and Bing, from launch to today

  1. Microsoft Bing and Yandex launch the IndexNow protocol for instant notification of URL changes.

  2. Microsoft launches 'the new Bing' and Edge with an AI chat, Bing Chat.

  3. Microsoft announces Microsoft Copilot across Windows, Edge, Bing and Microsoft 365.

  4. Bing introduces the NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE controls over how content is used in Bing Chat and in training Microsoft's generative AI models.

  5. At Ignite, Microsoft says Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will simply become Copilot.

  6. Microsoft relaunches consumer Copilot as a redesigned AI companion, with Copilot Voice.

  7. Copilot Search launches in Bing, blending classic and generative search with prominent citations.

  8. Microsoft AI unveils its first in-house models, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, intended for Copilot.

  9. Bing adds support for the data-nosnippet HTML attribute across Bing Search and Copilot.

  10. The AI Performance report, showing citations in Copilot and Bing's AI answers, launches in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview.

  11. Bing rewrites its Webmaster Guidelines to cover Copilot grounding, meta directives for AI answers and GEO abuse.

  12. Microsoft AI's MAI-Thinking-1 reasoning model reaches public preview in Microsoft Foundry.

  13. Microsoft begins merging the consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps into a single Microsoft Copilot app.

Things to know

Things to know about Microsoft Copilot and Bing

  1. There is no separate Copilot crawler. Blocking bingbot removes a site from the index Copilot is grounded in.

  2. robots.txt alone will not keep a URL out of Copilot: Bing says robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing, and recommends NOINDEX.

  3. NOARCHIVE keeps a page out of Copilot answers and grounding; NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. Pages with either still appear in normal Bing results.

  4. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows how often a site is cited in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner integrations, with cited pages and sample grounding queries.

  5. Copilot sends Bing a short generated query of a few words, not the user's full prompt, and Copilot Chat shows users the exact queries it sent.

  6. Bing's 2026 guidelines formally define generative engine optimisation (GEO) and list prompt injection and 'artificially engineered language' designed to trigger citations as abuse.

  7. Bing recommends IndexNow so Copilot stops citing outdated or deleted URLs sooner. One IndexNow submission reaches every participating engine, including Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver.

  8. Bing says duplicate URLs reduce its confidence in choosing a URL for grounding or citations, and treats accurate lastmod values and ETag headers as freshness signals.

  9. Verify bingbot with a reverse DNS lookup to a search.msn.com hostname and a forward lookup, rather than hard-coded IP addresses.

  10. Microsoft does not train on conversations from signed-out users, under-18s, users who opt out, or users in Brazil, mainland China, Israel, Nigeria, South Korea and Vietnam.

The four layers

How Microsoft Copilot and Bing builds an answer

Every AI answer is made in four layers: what the model learned in pre-training, how it was tuned, what it retrieves live, and how it puts the answer together. Here is each one for Microsoft Copilot and Bing, and what it means for a brand that wants to be cited.

  1. Layer 1

    Pre-training: the base (foundation) model

    Microsoft says Copilot uses language and multimodal models from Microsoft, OpenAI and other developers. Microsoft AI also builds its own: MAI-1-preview, its first foundation model trained end to end (August 2025), and MAI-Thinking-1, in preview since August 2026. Which model answers a given prompt, and its cut-off, is not published. Microsoft uses de-identified data from Bing, MSN, Copilot and ad interactions for AI training, with exclusions and opt-outs, and Bing said in 2023 that pages without NOCACHE or NOARCHIVE may be used to train its generative models.

    What it means for you: For Copilot's web answers, the models' memory matters less than Bing's live index. But Bing's 2023 guidance means your NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE choices may also shape what Microsoft's future models learn, so set them deliberately.

  2. Layer 2

    Post-training: tuning and alignment

    Microsoft's Transparency Note describes safety work on the underlying models before release, including intensive model training and safety fine-tuning, classifiers, red teaming and controls on training data, prompts and outputs, under Microsoft's AI Principles and Responsible AI Standard. Detailed alignment methods for Copilot's models are not published.

    What it means for you: Tuning shapes how Copilot frames answers, but it centres them on high-ranking web content. For brands, Bing's quality and anti-abuse rules matter more than the model's training: manipulative 'GEO' tactics are now explicitly treated as abuse.

  3. Layer 3

    Retrieval: live search

    Copilot is grounded in web search results and centres its answers on high-ranking web content. It generates a short query of a few words from the prompt and sends it to Bing without user or tenant identifiers, and these queries do not affect Bing's rankings. Bing says Copilot relies on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as classic search. Users can switch web search off.

    What it means for you: Bing SEO is Copilot SEO. Rank well in Bing for the few-word queries Copilot generates, submit changes through IndexNow, and remove duplicates, because each decides whether Bing picks your URL for grounding.

  4. Layer 4

    The answer: what people read

    Web-grounded answers carry hyperlinked citations below the text. Copilot Search in Bing links whole sentences or passages to their sources, places cited sources and web results at the top and bottom, and lists every link used. Copilot Chat shows the exact search queries it sent to Bing, for 24 hours.

    What it means for you: Citations are measurable through Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report. Use its sample grounding queries to see which questions bring you into answers, and write passages that answer them directly.

Crawlers

Microsoft Copilot and Bing's crawlers and user agents

The user-agent tokens to look for in your server logs and to name in robots.txt.

Crawlers and fetchers associated with Microsoft Copilot and Bing, with what each does and how it treats robots.txt
User-agent tokenWhat it doesrobots.txt
bingbot
Documentation		Bing's standard crawler, which handles most of its crawling and feeds the index Copilot is grounded in. User agent: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36, with desktop and mobile variants.Follows robots.txt, and crawl rate can be set hourly in Bing Webmaster Tools. robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing.
adidxbot
Documentation		Used by Bing Ads: crawls ads and follows them to the advertised websites for quality control.Covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance.
BingPreview
Documentation		Generates page snapshots for Bing, in desktop and mobile variants. Bing lists bingbot-style user agents for it.Covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance.
MicrosoftPreview
Documentation		Generates page snapshots for Microsoft products. Its user agent includes 'compatible; MicrosoftPreview/2.0; +https://aka.ms/MicrosoftPreview'.Covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance.
BingVideoPreview
Documentation		Provides video previews in Bing only.Covered by Bing's general robots.txt guidance.

Bing's crawler page names no robots.txt token for each crawler; the tokens shown are the product names in their user agents. BingPreview may be indistinguishable from bingbot by user agent alone.

Crawl sources

Where Microsoft Copilot and Bing crawls from, and how to verify it

Bing publishes bingbot's IP ranges as JSON at bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json and asks site owners to refresh the list daily, because it can change at any time. When we checked on 6 October 2026 it held 28 IPv4 prefixes, such as 157.55.39.0/24, 207.46.13.0/24 and 40.77.167.0/24, and no IPv6.

Bing's preferred check is DNS rather than hard-coded addresses: a reverse lookup on the IP must return a hostname ending in search.msn.com, such as msnbot-157-55-33-18.search.msn.com, and a forward lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. Microsoft's Verify Bingbot tool runs the check for you.

Separate verification for MicrosoftPreview, BingVideoPreview and adidxbot is not published, and Microsoft publishes no networks for its crawlers.

Opting out

How to opt out of Microsoft Copilot and Bing, or limit what it uses

  1. Keep a URL out entirely with NOINDEX

    Bing's guidelines say to use NOINDEX when a URL should not appear in Bing search, Copilot or grounding API results.

    Official page

  2. Keep a page out of Copilot with NOARCHIVE

    NOARCHIVE keeps content out of Copilot responses and grounding results while the page stays in normal Bing results. Bing's 2023 announcement added that NOARCHIVE content will not be used to train Microsoft's generative models.

    Official page

  3. Limit Copilot to your snippet with NOCACHE

    NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet, which reduces citation depth and answer quality. If both tags are present, Bing treats the page as NOCACHE.

    Official page

  4. Hide sections with data-nosnippet

    data-nosnippet hides marked sections from search results and AI answers while the page stays eligible. NOSNIPPET removes captions altogether and may limit Copilot's citations.

    Official page

  5. Remove or refresh pages

    The Block URLs tool in Bing Webmaster Tools hides a page or directory for up to 90 days, usually within 12 hours. The Content Removal Tool lets anyone ask for dead pages to be removed, or outdated results refreshed, in Bing and Copilot.

    Official page

  6. Tell Bing about changes with IndexNow

    Submit added, updated or deleted URLs through IndexNow, so Bing and Copilot drop outdated references sooner.

    Official page

  7. Personal data and training

    Use Bing's European form to ask for personal data to be delisted. Signed-in Copilot users can turn off training on their conversations and voice in privacy settings.

    Official page

Every Copilot control is a Bing control, so the trade-offs are sharp: NOARCHIVE removes you from Copilot's answers, and NOCACHE thins your citations. robots.txt blocks crawling but not indexing, so a blocked URL can still be known to Bing; use NOINDEX if you truly want a page gone.

How we help

How we get brands cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing

The Coaley Peak GEO Research Centre researches and implements GEO for SEO agencies and in-house teams, with foreign markets as our speciality.

  1. Bing and Copilot visibility audit

    We use Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report and our own tests to see where you are cited in Copilot, for which grounding queries, and where competitors win.

  2. Bing SEO for grounding

    We fix what reduces Bing's confidence in your URLs, such as duplicates, weak freshness signals and crawl gaps, and set up IndexNow so changes reach Copilot quickly.

  3. Meta directive policy

    We set NOARCHIVE, NOCACHE and data-nosnippet page by page, so you control what Copilot uses without losing the citations you want.

  4. GEO that stays within Bing's rules

    Bing now names manipulative GEO as abuse. We improve how your content answers questions, without the prompt injection or engineered language that would put you at risk.

  5. International Bing

    Bing and Copilot are strong in some markets and weak in others. We prioritise them where your customers actually use them.

More on our research, services and team at the Coaley Peak GEO Research Centre.

FAQ

Microsoft Copilot and Bing GEO: questions

  • Does Copilot have its own crawler?

    No. Copilot is grounded in Bing's index, crawled by bingbot. Blocking bingbot removes a site from the index Copilot draws on, and Bing says Copilot relies on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as classic search.

  • How do I keep a page out of Copilot but in Bing?

    Use the NOARCHIVE meta directive. Bing says it keeps content out of Copilot responses and grounding results, while the page still appears in normal Bing search results.

  • Can I see how often Copilot cites my site?

    Yes. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, shows citations in Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner integrations, with cited pages and sample grounding queries.

  • What is the difference between NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE?

    NOARCHIVE keeps a page out of Copilot answers and grounding. NOCACHE lets Copilot use only the URL, title and snippet, which reduces how deeply it can cite you. If both are present, Bing treats the page as NOCACHE.

  • Does robots.txt keep my pages out of Copilot?

    Not reliably. Bing says robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing, so a blocked URL can still be indexed from links. Use NOINDEX to keep a URL out of Bing, Copilot and grounding results.

  • What does Bing say about GEO?

    Bing's 2026 Webmaster Guidelines formally define generative engine optimisation and treat prompt injection and artificially engineered language designed to trigger citations as abuse.

Want a free chat about Microsoft Copilot and Bing?

Tell us which market and brand you are working on. If we can help, we will set up a free, no-obligation chat with Stephen or Ethan.

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Independence and trademarks. Microsoft, Copilot and Bing are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. Coaley Peak is independent: we are not associated with, endorsed by or a partner of Microsoft Corporation. This guide is our own research from public documentation and reputable reporting, checked in October 2026.

Reviewed by Stephen Grindley, research centre lead. Last checked .

Document reference: ISO_webpage_geo_engine_microsoft_copilot_v1

Last modified: 7 October 2026

GEO Research Centre·Engine guides·Microsoft Copilot and Bing