Bing Webmaster Tools quietly shipped one of the more useful AI-visibility features any search engine has released this year, and most SEOs haven't opened the tab yet. It's easy to see why it gets overlooked: Bing's organic market share is small next to Google, and Copilot doesn't get the same coverage ChatGPT and Gemini do in most SEO newsletters, so a beta feature buried inside Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance section isn't going to trend the way a Google core update does. That's exactly why it's worth a close look now, before it's a standard part of everyone's workflow and the easy early wins it surfaces have already been picked off by whoever noticed first. Topics Portfolio, launched in beta on October 13, 2026 by Microsoft's Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam and Vivek Jain, groups the queries where a site gets cited inside Copilot and Bing AI answers into broad topic clusters, then shows exactly where a competitor is winning citations a site isn't. That's a specific, actionable gap report, not another vanity metric, and it's free inside a tool most sites already have access to.

What Topics Portfolio actually shows

The core idea is grouping. Bing's AI Performance report already tracked "grounding queries," the specific questions that triggered an AI answer citing your site, one at a time. Topics Portfolio takes that same underlying data and clusters it into themes, Bing's own example mentions something like "football, taxes, or AI chatbots," so instead of scrolling a flat list of hundreds of individual queries, you see the shape of where your site actually has AI visibility and where it doesn't.

Each topic in the portfolio comes with three numbers Bing calls ecosystem measures. Topic Size is the approximate total citation volume across all sites for that theme, a sense of how much AI-answer traffic the topic generates overall. Sites Cited is roughly how many different sites get cited anywhere within that topic, which tells you how concentrated or spread out the citations for that topic are. Queries is the approximate count of distinct grounding queries feeding that topic. None of these are exact figures; Bing presents them as ranges and calls them directional, which matters when deciding how much weight to put on any single number here.

Top Opportunity Queries: the actually useful part

The headline feature inside Topics Portfolio is a list Bing calls Top Opportunity Queries: specific queries, across your whole topic portfolio, where a competitor is getting cited and your site isn't. This flips the usual AI-visibility workflow. Most of what's available elsewhere in this category, including the tools covered in our best Microsoft Copilot rank trackers roundup, tells you where you already show up. Top Opportunity Queries tells you specifically where you don't, and names the queries worth going after first because the demand (citation volume) is already proven by whoever's winning it now.

Where this fits inside Bing's broader AI Performance report

Topics Portfolio isn't a standalone product, it's a new tab inside the AI Performance report Bing Webmaster Tools already runs, sitting next to the existing Citations & Pages view. Search Engine Land's coverage of the launch and Search Engine Journal's writeup both frame it the same way Bing's own announcement does: this is Bing extending data it was already collecting on grounding queries, not launching a new tracking system from scratch. That matters for expectations. A site that's never checked its Citations & Pages data won't suddenly get a richer picture from Topics Portfolio; the new report organizes the same underlying signal differently, and a site with little or no grounding-query history will see a correspondingly thin or empty Topics Portfolio view.

How to access it

Log into Bing Webmaster Tools, open the AI Performance section, and look for a Topics Portfolio tab next to the existing Citations & Pages tab. It's beta, and Bing's own documentation is direct about the gating: the tab only appears once a site has enough grounding-query data for the report to be meaningful. A small or newly indexed site may not see the tab at all yet, which lines up with the same cold-start problem covered in our AI tool launch checklist: there's no meaningful AI-visibility report to show for a site that doesn't have enough AI citations yet to analyze in the first place.

The limitations worth knowing before you trust it

Bing is upfront about several caveats, and they're worth taking at face value rather than treating this as a precise analytics product. Topic classification runs on an AI model sorting queries into themes, and Bing acknowledges it can occasionally misclassify a query into the wrong topic, so a theme's numbers can include some noise. Citation counts are approximate ranges, not exact figures, which means you shouldn't read a tracked-week-over-week change of a few percentage points as meaningful; the ranges are built for directional reading, not for the kind of precise reporting a ranking-position tracker gives you. Branded competitor queries can also show up inside Top Opportunity Queries, meaning a query is specifically about a named competitor and was never realistically going to cite your site regardless of what you publish, so the opportunity list needs a human read before anyone treats every row as something worth chasing.

How to actually use this

Start with the topics where your Topic Size number is large and your own presence is thin or missing entirely; that's the combination that tells you real demand exists and you're specifically not capturing it, rather than a niche topic nobody's asking about. From there, open the Top Opportunity Queries list for that topic and manually check a sample of the queries: read what's actually being asked, check who's winning the citation now, and ask honestly whether your site has (or could build) something that adds real information on that specific question, not just a generic page that covers the topic broadly. This is the same discipline our information gain piece gets into for Google's core updates: a page that only restates what the currently-cited source already says isn't likely to displace it, in an AI answer or a traditional ranking, so the opportunity list is most useful as a prioritized list of what to research and build something genuinely new for, not a checklist of titles to write quickly.

It's also worth treating this as one input among several rather than the whole AI-visibility picture. Topics Portfolio only covers Bing and Copilot's grounding data; it says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, each of which runs its own separate citation logic and would need its own tracking, whether that's a dedicated tool like the ones in our best AI visibility tools roundup or manual spot-checking. A topic with strong Bing citation volume and zero presence doesn't necessarily mean the same gap exists on ChatGPT; Bing's own search index and Copilot's retrieval behavior don't map one-to-one onto how OpenAI's models choose what to cite.

What this means for agencies managing multiple sites

Anyone managing AI visibility across several client sites should treat Topics Portfolio as a reason to add one more recurring check to a monthly reporting cycle, not as a replacement for whatever's already being tracked. Because the report groups by topic rather than by page, it's genuinely faster to scan across a portfolio of client sites than the flat Citations & Pages view is, which makes it a reasonable first pass: open each client's Topics Portfolio, note which topics show a real gap against Topic Size, and only drill into Citations & Pages or a dedicated cross-engine tracker for the topics that look worth the deeper work. For an agency already paying for one of the AI visibility tools for agencies we've covered elsewhere, this is a free, Bing-specific complement to that spend, not a reason to drop it, since none of those tools currently replicate the specific topic-clustering and opportunity-query view Bing just shipped.

Why Bing building this matters beyond the feature itself

Microsoft shipping a dedicated, free tool for finding AI-citation gaps is a signal about where the whole category is heading, and it's worth more attention than a single beta feature might otherwise get. Google's own Generative AI features report in Search Console, rolled out to every site worldwide on August 31, 2026, covers similar ground but stops at impressions: it shows how often your pages appeared inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features, broken down by page, country, device and date, with no click, CTR or query-level data yet. Bing's Topics Portfolio goes a step further than that by naming the specific queries where a competitor gets cited and you don't, something Google's current AI reporting doesn't offer. If Google adds a comparable competitive-gap view later, which would be a natural next step, Bing will have been first to ship it, the same way Microsoft has moved first on several AI-search reporting features this year.

A realistic first session with the report

Budget 30 to 45 minutes for a first real look, not five minutes of skimming. Open every topic where Topic Size is meaningful relative to your site's actual traffic potential in that area, note which ones show strong citation presence already (leave those alone for now) versus which ones show real demand and weak or no presence (your actual target list). For each target topic, pull the Top Opportunity Queries, strip out anything clearly branded to a competitor by name, and for what's left, check whether the current cited source is something genuinely hard to beat (a primary data source, an official vendor page) or something beatable (a thin aggregator post, an outdated guide). That filtered list, usually a handful of queries per topic rather than dozens, is the actual to-do list this report is built to produce.

A worked example of how to read the report

Say a site selling project management software opens Topics Portfolio and finds a topic labeled something like "AI meeting notes," with a large Topic Size relative to the site's other topics, a high Sites Cited count (meaning lots of different sources are getting cited here, not one dominant player), and the site itself shows up in only a handful of the queries inside it. That combination, big demand, fragmented competition, thin own presence, is close to the ideal target this report is built to surface: there's room to win citations because no single competitor has locked the topic down. Pulling the Top Opportunity Queries for that topic might show something like "best AI tool for meeting notes in project management software" with a competitor's comparison page winning the citation. If that page is thin or outdated, that's a specific, well-evidenced brief for a new or improved page; if it's a thorough, well-maintained resource from an established competitor, that's a signal to deprioritize that specific query and look at the next one down the list instead. The report doesn't do that judgment call for you, it just makes sure you're spending the judgment on queries with actual proven demand rather than guessing at topics from scratch.

Does Topics Portfolio replace Bing's existing Citations & Pages report?

No, it sits alongside it. Citations & Pages still shows the flat, query-by-query and page-by-page view; Topics Portfolio adds the thematic, competitive layer on top of the same underlying data. Use Citations & Pages to check a specific known query or page, and Topics Portfolio to find gaps you didn't know to look for.

Why doesn't my site show a Topics Portfolio tab yet?

Bing gates the tab behind a minimum amount of grounding-query data; a smaller site, or one that doesn't get cited much in Copilot and Bing AI answers yet, simply won't have enough data for the report to generate anything meaningful. Keep building the kind of citation-worthy content covered in our launch checklist and check back periodically rather than assuming the feature is broken.

What's the difference between a grounding query and a regular search query?

A grounding query is the specific question Bing's AI system actually ran to retrieve sources before generating an answer, which isn't always identical to what the user typed. A user's question might get expanded or rephrased internally into one or more grounding queries before the system decides what to cite, similar in spirit to how our query fan-out explained piece describes the same behavior on the Google and ChatGPT side. That's part of why Bing's AI Performance data, grounding queries and all, can look different from a straightforward keyword-level view of what people are searching.

Can I trust the exact citation numbers in the report for reporting to a client or a boss?

Treat them as directional, not exact, and say so plainly if you're passing them along. Bing describes every figure in this report as approximate; use the relative comparisons, this topic has far more citation volume than that one, this competitor dominates this query cluster, rather than quoting a specific number as a precise metric.

Does being cited more often in Bing and Copilot actually matter if most of my traffic comes from Google?

It depends on how much of your actual audience uses Copilot or Bing directly, which varies a lot by industry and by whether your buyers are on Microsoft-heavy enterprise software. For a lot of consumer brands it's a smaller slice of total AI-search traffic than ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews. For B2B and enterprise-software categories specifically, Copilot's integration into Microsoft 365 and Windows gives it more default usage than its standalone market share might suggest, which makes a free, detailed gap report like this one worth the 30 minutes even if Bing isn't the primary channel.