Bing Webmaster Tools Unveils Game-Changing AI Search Query Sorting — What It Means for Your SEO

Ever wondered what it’s like to peek behind the AI curtain and see exactly how Bing decides which websites to showcase in its smart answers? Microsoft just dropped a beta gem in Bing Webmaster Tools called Topics Portfolio—a sleek new feature inside the AI Performance report that clusters your site’s AI citations into broad topics, and, intriguingly, points out the gaps where your competitors get the spotlight instead. This isn’t just some bland stats dashboard; it’s a strategic playground revealing not only where you shine but where untapped opportunities lie—kind of like a treasure map for content creators hungry to fill in those pesky coverage holes. But fair warning—the tool’s data dances between precise counts and directional signals, reminding us all that AI’s take on relevance is as much art as it is science. If you’re into uncovering those juicy insights to outsmart the competition and boost your site’s AI visibility, this beta might just be your new best friend. Dive deeper and see what’s cooking. LEARN MORE.

Microsoft announced a beta feature called Topics Portfolio inside the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. It groups the queries your site is cited for in AI answers into broader topics and lists queries in those topics where other sites appear and yours doesn’t.

Bing calls those grounding queries, which are the search terms that Bing’s AI uses to locate content (and cite) in its answers using both Copilot and Bing’s AI summary along with select partner integrations. The new view will only show up if Bing has enough data on your website. Topics with too little site presence or ecosystem activity won’t be displayed by Bing, therefore smaller websites might get fewer items listed or possibly not see this feature at all.

What Topics Portfolio Shows

Topics Portfolio resides within a new tab to the right of Citations & Pages in the AI Performance section. The first screen of Topics Portfolio provides you with topics where the company refers to your site as having a “meaningful” presence. Three metrics accompany each listed topic.

The Topic Size metric represents an estimated total citation count across all sites for the topic during the time frame you have specified; this is described by the company as a way to gauge demand for searches through their AI. Sites Cited indicates the approximate number of sites that appear for queries in the topic. Queries shows the approximate number of different grounding queries that exist within the topic.

Immediately below the table showing your topics is a list called Top Opportunity Queries. This list pulls opportunities from across your topics and includes queries in which other websites are cited but your website is not. All numbers representing citation volume in this list are provided in range form.

Clicking a topic opens a detail page with the topic’s size, your citations within it, and its query count. One table underneath lists the topic’s queries where your site already appears. The other lists the topic’s opportunity queries, again with citation ranges.

You can view the data over a one-, two- or three-month window.

What’s Different From June

Compared to the June release, Topics Portfolio can provide a total across all sites at the topic level. It can also list queries your site is not being cited on. Microsoft has stated that the portfolio view, ecosystem context and opportunity queries are the items the report couldn’t show before.

AI Performance went into public preview in February; I wrote about the June updates that included Topics, Intents, Citation Share and Compare. Those Topics labels were groupings of the grounding queries where your site was already cited.

Citation Share, which was introduced in June as well, provides your percent of all citations for a grounding query. Bing states on their AI Performance help page that Citation Share does not reveal competitor domain names and is intended to illustrate your presence relative to others without showing any data related to others.

Beta Limits

Topics Portfolio’s topics are generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) therefore it is possible to land a query that would be categorized under a different label than how you would label it. In addition, branded searches may appear as opportunities. An example of this from Microsoft was a shoe website which had their competitor’s brand search on the Running Shoes topic as an opportunity.

Microsoft wrote:

“Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.”

Each opportunity query or topic row has a “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” option for feedback.

Why This Matters

Opportunity queries hand content teams a list of queries about their own topics where AI answers reference other sites, but do not reference theirs. That makes Bing’s beta a starting point for finding coverage gaps, though the list can include rival-brand queries that aren’t relevant to your site. The topic measurements provided through Topics Portfolio are estimates. The opportunity volumes come as ranges, so these numbers will provide an approximate comparison among various topics; however, they will not allow you to track specific citation counts.

Looking Ahead

Bing’s AI Performance help page didn’t cover Topics Portfolio as of this writing, so the limits section of Bing’s post is the main written guidance for now. Bing’s announcement gives no date for Topics Portfolio to leave beta. Microsoft says ratings from the feedback controls go to the team handling classification and opportunity selection, and shape what it fixes first.

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