Bing and Copilot for MSPs: The AI Assistant Your Buyers Already Use at Work
How Microsoft Copilot finds web answers through Bing, why that matters for MSPs whose buyers live in Microsoft 365, and the setup that gets you found there.
Last updated: October 7, 2026
Written by Holly Mack, Fractional CMO, C4 Solutions
Microsoft Copilot answers web questions by sending a short search to Bing, so an MSP that isn’t visible in Bing is invisible to buyers asking Copilot for IT providers. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, IndexNow, and Bing Places.
Your buyers are already in Copilot
Bing work is an overlooked piece of answer engine optimization for MSPs, and the reason it matters is simple once you see it, because your buyers live in Microsoft 365 and Copilot pulls its web answers from Bing. Import your site from Google Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools. Turn on IndexNow. Claim Bing Places. Then use Bing’s new AI Performance report to see which of your pages Copilot already cites.
Picture your best prospect’s office manager. They have Microsoft 365 open all day. Copilot sits right there in the sidebar, one click away, already signed in with the company’s Microsoft account and ready to answer whatever they ask it next.
They type a question. Who are the good managed IT providers near Irvine for a 25-person CPA firm?
Copilot doesn’t ask Google. Microsoft’s own documentation explains that Copilot generates a short query based on the prompt and sends it to Bing. If your MSP isn’t in Bing’s index, or your pages are thin there, you’re not in that answer, no matter how well you rank on Google, because Copilot never looked at Google in the first place. And plenty of MSPs have never once logged into Bing Webmaster Tools.
It’s a big audience. Microsoft reported in July 2026 that its workplace Copilot had more than 30 million paid seats, and that’s before counting the free Copilot Chat that comes with business subscriptions.
How Does Copilot Find Web Answers?
When web search is turned on, Microsoft Copilot turns a user’s prompt into a short Bing query of a few words, strips out user and tenant identifiers, and uses the Bing results to ground its answer. Copilot’s Sources button shows the exact query it sent to Bing.
Admin documentation from Microsoft describes the same flow. Copilot may fetch information from the Bing search service, with the generated query sent without user or tenant identifiers. One naming note. In August 2026, Microsoft renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot to Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to Microsoft Copilot Chat.
In practice, it’s simple. A buyer’s long, chatty question becomes a few keywords. Something like managed IT Irvine CPA firm. Your service pages and industry pages need to answer that compressed version clearly.
Do MSP Buyers Actually Use Bing?
More than owners assume, especially at work. Bing held 18.8% of US desktop search in September 2026, about double its share across all devices, and that’s before counting the Bing searches Copilot runs on a buyer’s behalf.
| Measure | Share | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Bing, US desktop search, Sept 2026 | 18.8% | StatCounter |
| Bing, US search on all devices | 9.89% | StatCounter |
| Edge, US desktop browsers | 14.82% | StatCounter |
Desktop is where buying happens. An office manager comparing IT providers at their desk is on a Windows machine, very possibly in Edge, very possibly with Bing as the default. Google still wins overall. Nobody’s arguing that. But nearly one desktop search in five is a slice no MSP should leave on the table.
Microsoft also says Bing passed a billion monthly users for the first time this year, as Search Engine Journal reported in April 2026. That’s Microsoft’s own claim. Still a lot of people.
Setting Up Bing Webmaster Tools
Import your site from Google Search Console. It takes a few minutes, verifies ownership automatically, and Bing says data can take up to 48 hours to appear.
- Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools with a Microsoft account
- Choose import, then sign in with the Google account that owns your Search Console property
- Select the site. Done.
- Submit your sitemap, then check the URL inspection tool on your three key service pages.
Bing’s import guide notes you can bring in up to 100 sites at once and that ownership is rechecked periodically against Search Console. One site? A coffee break.
IndexNow
Turn it on. IndexNow pings Bing whenever a page goes live or changes, which matters because Copilot answers from Bing’s current view of your site.
Adoption is huge. Bing said in December 2024 that more than 3.5 billion URLs were being submitted through IndexNow every day. No guarantees, though. The IndexNow FAQ says plainly that submitting a URL doesn’t guarantee immediate indexing, and Google isn’t a participant. It’s still the fastest way to tell Bing something changed. Several WordPress SEO plugins offer it as a simple toggle.
Bing Places for Business
Claim it, and import from your Google Business Profile so the details match. Bing relaunched Bing Places in October 2025, with listings showing in Bing search and Bing Maps.
The relaunch announcement moved Bing Places to a new home and described the Google import as faster and more reliable, keeping your name, hours, and contact details. It also mentioned deeper integration with Copilot as a plan, so a clean listing now is a reasonable bet. Same name, address, and phone number everywhere. The profile itself is covered in our Google Business Profile playbook for AI search.
The AI Performance Report
Bing Webmaster Tools now shows how frequently Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages. Use it to find the service pages Copilot already trusts, then improve those first.
Launched as a public preview in February 2026, the report tracks citations across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and some partner integrations. It shows total citations, the queries that grounded each answer, and page-level activity. In June 2026, Bing added Citation Share, the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown for a query.
This is rare. Google doesn’t give you anything like it for AI Overviews yet. For an MSP, the grounding queries are gold, because they show the exact few-word searches Copilot ran when it decided to cite you, which tells you what wording to use on the next page you want cited. Pair it with the monthly prompt tracking in our guide to measuring MSP AI search visibility.
What Bing’s Guidelines Say About AI
Bing’s webmaster guidelines now cover generative engine optimization directly. They explain how page directives affect Copilot and flag large-scale unsupervised AI content and prompt injection as abuse.
Search Engine Journal’s coverage of the February 2026 rewrite notes that a NOARCHIVE directive keeps content out of Copilot, while NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title, and snippet. Check for either tag. They sometimes get set by a security or privacy plugin and forgotten.
Anyone tempted to mass-produce pages should read the abuse section. Bing targets content generated at scale without human oversight, and it treats hidden instructions aimed at AI systems as manipulation. Write for people. Copilot will follow.
The Admin Setting You Already Manage
One twist. You probably control whether your clients’ Copilot can search the web at all. Microsoft’s Allow web search in Copilot policy is set by the tenant admin, which for a lot of small businesses means their MSP.
Microsoft’s admin documentation lists three options for the policy, enabled, disabled, or disabled in work mode, and says web search is on by default unless certain optional connected experiences are turned off. Government cloud tenants have it off by default.
That’s an opening. You’re one of the few vendors who can explain to a prospect, in plain terms, exactly how Copilot reaches the web and what data it sends, because you manage that switch for a living. Put that explanation on your Microsoft 365 service page.
What About ChatGPT?
ChatGPT has relied on Bing in the past, but OpenAI’s current documentation doesn’t name a search provider. What it does say is that its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, surfaces websites in ChatGPT search, so don’t block it.
OpenAI’s crawler documentation describes OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features. Treat Bing visibility and ChatGPT visibility as related but separate jobs. Our guide on getting your MSP recommended by ChatGPT covers that side.
Where C4 Fits
C4 Solutions is a growth partner for MSPs and technology companies, based in Irvine, California. Our AEO work covers Google, Bing, Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude together, and we track AI citations monthly with a fixed set of prompts so you can see what changed.
Everything in this post you can do yourself in an afternoon. Honestly. If you’d like us to check how your MSP shows up in Bing and Copilot today, book a search visibility call.
Bing and Copilot Questions From MSP Owners
Do my prospects even use Bing, or is it all Google?
18.8% of US desktop searches ran on Bing in September 2026, according to StatCounter.
Add the Bing searches Copilot runs for buyers inside Microsoft 365, and Bing matters more than its headline share suggests.
When someone asks Copilot for a good IT provider near them, where does the answer come from?
From Bing. Copilot turns the question into a short Bing search and grounds its answer in the results.
The Sources button in Copilot shows the exact query it sent, which is a useful thing to test with your own MSP’s name and services.
Is Bing Webmaster Tools worth it if I already use Google Search Console?
Yes, and the import takes minutes.
It’s also the only place you can currently see how frequently Copilot cites your pages.
Should I claim Bing Places if my Google Business Profile is already done?
Claim it and import from Google so everything matches.
Consistent details across both platforms help search engines and AI tools trust they’re looking at the same business.
Can I see when Copilot cites my website?
Partly. Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report shows citations across Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and some partners.
It shows which pages were cited and which short searches triggered them. It won’t show you every conversation, and it’s still labeled a preview, so treat the trend as more reliable than any single day’s number.
Does ChatGPT still use Bing?
ChatGPT has relied on Bing before, but OpenAI’s documentation doesn’t name a provider today.
Allow OAI-SearchBot and work on Bing visibility anyway. Both help.
Get found in the assistant your buyers already use.
Book a search visibility call and we’ll check how your MSP shows up in Bing and Copilot today, and what to fix first.
Book a Search Visibility Call