AI & AEO

Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat)

Quick Definition

Microsoft Copilot is the AI search and assistant surface across Bing, Edge, Windows, and Microsoft 365, powered by GPT-class models with grounding via Bing's search index.

In context

Copilot ranks as the second-most-cited AI search surface in Canadian commercial queries (behind Google AI Overviews and ahead of Perplexity for general queries). Optimising for Copilot largely means optimising for Bing Web Search — high-quality structured content, clear schema, fresh dates, and a Bing Webmaster Tools account with submitted sitemaps. Bing's ranking system is more responsive to direct-answer formatting and semantic clustering than Google's, so concise answer-first content tends to be cited disproportionately.

Example

A Toronto law firm with strong Bing rankings (ahead of its Google rankings) sees Copilot citations show up first — Microsoft's AI surface skews to whatever Bing already trusts.

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Related terms

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