Guide
How to get cited by Microsoft Copilot
Bing’s guidelines put Copilot on the same crawl and index as Bing search. Bingbot, noindex, noarchive, and nocache are the controls Microsoft publishes.
14 October 2026 · CiteScore Team · 10 min read
Microsoft Copilot’s web answers sit on Bing’s crawl and index. Bing’s webmaster guidelines describe one foundation for Bing search, Copilot, and grounding API results. There is no separate Copilot crawler token in Bing’s crawler list. CiteScore does not log into Copilot or Bing. The claims below are from Bing Webmaster Tools.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini publish their own controls. The map is how to get cited by AI answer engines. What “answer engine optimization” does and does not mean is on answer engine optimization.
Bingbot is the crawl
Bing’s crawler overview says Bingbot is the standard crawler and handles most crawling. AdIdxBot is for ads. BingPreview and MicrosoftPreview build page snapshots. None of those is a second index for Copilot. The guidelines say Copilot search experiences use the same crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as Bing search.
Robots.txt tells Bing’s crawlers how to interact with the site. It does not, by itself, decide indexing. Bing’s robots.txt note says that when there is no bingbot or msnbot group, Bingbot honors the wildcard group, and that a bingbot group replaces the other groups. Copy any disallow you still want into that group. An old msnbot disallow, with no bingbot group of its own, still applies to Bingbot.
User-agent: bingbot Allow: /
User-agent strings can be spoofed. Bing says to confirm an IP with the Verify Bingbot tool before treating a request as theirs. The three tokens CiteScore records — GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended — do not include bingbot. That page is AI crawlers.
Meta tags that change Copilot
Bing’s guidelines and robots meta tag list separate crawl from what Copilot may quote:
| Directive | What Bing says it does |
|---|---|
| noindex | Keeps the URL out of Bing search, Copilot experiences, and grounding API results. Bingbot still has to crawl the page to see the tag. The removal guide says the same tag is how a page that stays online leaves Bing and Copilot. |
| noarchive | Prevents the content from being used in Copilot responses and grounding results. |
| nocache | Limits Copilot to the URL, title, and snippet, which Bing says reduces citation depth. If both nocache and noarchive are present, Bing treats the page as nocache. |
| nosnippet | Stops captions. Bing says that may limit Copilot citation quality. data-nosnippet works the same way on the marked section. |
A page you want quoted should be crawlable by Bingbot, indexable, and free of noarchive and nocache. Bing does not publish a citation rate for Copilot.
What the guidelines leave out
The Copilot section of the guidelines does not require a schema type or an llms.txt file. It does say SEO practices that help discovery and content clarity also support eligibility for grounding and citations. Put the fact in HTML Bingbot can render. Hiding the only copy of a price or a policy inside client-side script is one of the discovery problems the guidelines list.
Google’s version of the same split — Search features versus a training token — is Google AI Overviews optimization.
Check the public files
The free check does not parse bingbot, noarchive, or nocache. A clear Google-Extended row says nothing about Copilot.
Run the free check on the host. It reads the homepage, robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, /llms.txt, a sitemap, and JSON-LD on the homepage. It does not log into an answer engine. One URL continues at checkout.
Sources
- Bing webmaster guidelines. One crawl and index for Bing search, Copilot, and grounding.
- Which crawlers does Bing use? Bingbot, and robots.txt as the crawl control.
- Robots meta tags Bing supports. noindex, noarchive, nocache, and nosnippet.
- How to permanently remove a URL from Bing or Copilot. noindex, seen on a later crawl.
- To crawl or not to crawl, that is BingBot’s question. Wildcard groups, and a bingbot group that replaces them.