What is Microsoft Copilot?
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, built into Bing, Windows, and Edge, that answers using Bing's web index and shows citations for what it used.
Copilot behaves like Perplexity in shape: it searches, synthesizes an answer, and cites sources, but it draws on Bing's web index rather than a crawler built solely for one AI product. It shows up across several surfaces at once, the Bing website, Windows, and the Edge browser sidebar, all pulling from the same underlying search and answer system.
The easy thing to miss is that because Copilot leans on Bing's general index, visibility here tracks more closely with being well indexed by Bing than with the specific AI crawler list, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and so on, that teams often focus on. A site that has never checked its standing in Bing at all can be invisible to Copilot for reasons that have nothing to do with any AI-specific blocking.
Related
- AI OverviewsAI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries shown above the traditional results for some searches.
- CitationA citation is a source an AI assistant links or refers to in support of an answer it has given.
- Blue linksBlue links is the industry name for the traditional list of ten organic website links Google used to return for a query, used to distinguish that older format from the AI-written answers now placed above it.
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It reads pages to train and ground OpenAI's models, including ChatGPT.
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