Bing Webmaster Tools adds Topics Portfolio showing AI-cited queries by topic

Finding out which AI answers Bing already cites you on used to mean reading one grounding query at a time. Microsoft announced a beta Topics Portfolio view inside the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools on 13 October, with authors Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam and Vivek Jain. It groups the queries where a site is cited into themes, such as football, taxes or AI chatbots, and lists where other sites are cited and yours is not.

The report sits in a new tab next to Citations & Pages. The landing view lists the topics where Microsoft considers the site has a meaningful presence, with three measures beside each one.

What each column means

Topic Size is the approximate total citations across all sites for that theme over the selected window. Sites Cited is the approximate number of sites appearing for queries in the topic, which Bing describes as a crowding measure. Queries is the approximate number of distinct grounding queries in the topic. All three numbers are estimates.

Below the table, Top Opportunity Queries lists the strongest cross-topic queries where other sites appear and this site does not. Citation volumes in that list are shown as ranges, not exact counts.

Clicking a topic opens a detail page with three measures at the top, the topic size, the site's own citations within it and the query count, and two tables underneath: Your Grounding Queries, matching the data already in Citations & Pages, and Opportunity Queries in the same topic. The window selector covers one, two or three months.

What is new since June

Bing added the first version of the AI Performance report in February and extended it in June with Topics, Intents, Citation Share and Compare. Microsoft says Topics Portfolio adds three things the earlier report could not show: a topic-level total across all sites, ecosystem context, and a list of queries where the site is not cited.

The classification is produced by Bing's AI, so a query may land under a label the reader would not use, and branded searches can appear as opportunities. Microsoft gives an example of a shoe retailer where a competitor's brand term showed up in the Running Shoes topic. Each topic row and each opportunity query carries a thumbs up and thumbs down control that goes to the classification team.

What stays uncertain

The view only appears if Bing has enough data on the site, so smaller sites may see fewer topics or nothing at all. Microsoft states that opportunity volumes are ranges rather than counts, and asks readers to "treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger." No date was given for leaving beta, and the Bing Webmaster Tools help page did not cover Topics Portfolio when Search Engine Journal filed its report.

A content team that already uses the AI Performance report now has a short list of queries about its own themes where Bing's AI cites someone else. That is a sharper input to editorial planning than a one-page-at-a-time list of citations. The caveats stay: smaller sites may not see the view, the classifier can misread intent, and brand terms from rivals can show up as opportunities that are not opportunities at all.

Source

• Introducing Topics Portfolio (Beta) in AI Performance, Microsoft Bing
• Bing Webmaster Tools Sorts AI Search Queries Into Topics, Search Engine Journal