It’s neither the biggest nor the fastest-growing. So why invest in SEO for Copilot?
For three reasons:
1 – Copilot is everywhere in Microsoft’s ecosystem, and while the 430 million people using Microsoft 365 apps don’t all necessarily use the web functionalities of the tool, they are continuously exposed to it.
2 – Globally, 3.7 million businesses use Microsoft 365, and 70% of Fortune 500 companies have already adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot. (Source)
3 – Doing Copilot SEO isn’t a whole other project your team needs to take on. If you follow LLM SEO best practices, you’re optimizing for Copilot, too.
In other words, optimizing for Copilot prepares you for a growing audience of business Copilot users and fits perfectly into your overall LLM Search strategy.
What Is Copilot?
Microsoft uses “Copilot” as the umbrella term or brand name to cover all the functionalities of its generative AI services. These include:
Copilot is the standalone conversational AI. You can access it:
- At copilot.microsoft.com
- Through the Windows OS
- Via the Android and iOS Copilot app
- Through WhatsApp by adding Copilot as a contact
- Via Xbox
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the Copilot that is embedded in Microsoft 365 apps.
Copilot Studio is a customization, integration, and automation platform for companies using Copilot.
GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant inside Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).
Azure Copilot helps companies manage cloud resources.
Copilot Extensions allow third-party services to plug into Copilot so they can use its functionality directly within their tools.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll use the term Copilot to refer to the Copilot platform as it affects brand visibility and traffic generation for B2B companies.
Copilot Timeline
Microsoft launched Copilot in March 2023 as a “copilot for work,” integrated with the 365 suite and powering Business Chat, a tool that lets you surface and generate information based on the data logged in your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts.
Two months later, Microsoft expanded Copilot to the Windows OS, allowing users to access ChatGPT (+ plugins) and Bing Chat directly from the OS search bar.
In November 2023, Copilot absorbed Bing Chat, and its interface was launched at copilot.microsoft.com. One month later, the Copilot app became available for both Android and iOS.
In April 2025, Copilot became capable of remembering user input and providing personalized answers, and Microsoft integrated it with Bing as Copilot Search. Much like Google’s AI Mode, Copilot Search lives in Bing as a separate tab.
Just three months later, Copilot Mode became part of the Edge browser. The feature initially combined AI chat functionality with Bing search and navigation. It has since been expanded and is now able to, among other things:
- Make contextual recommendations
- Reason across multiple tabs
- Work with voice instructions
- Open different tabs
- Translate content
- Find information on a page
- Summarize content
- Group past searches into meaningful groups called “Journeys” so you can pick up where you left off without needing to bookmark a bunch of tabs*
- Help with shopping through cashback, price comparison, product insights, and price tracking features**
- Perform multi-step tasks like making a restaurant reservation or unsubscribing from certain newsletters using Copilot Actions*
*Only available as a limited preview in the U.S. at the time of writing.
**Some features are currently only available in the U.S., while others, such as price history, price comparison, and Microsoft Cashback, are already available in more countries.
In late 2025, users also noticed the appearance of a “Copilot Discover (Preview)” toggle in the top right of new tab pages. It’s turned off by default. When turned on, this experimental feature launches a Copilot Mode-like page that you can customize to show AI-powered, personalized content widgets, similar to the MSN content feed that is default on the regular Edge new tab page. Microsoft hasn’t yet made an official announcement about this feature.
A lot of Microsoft Suite – and thus Copilot – users are enterprise businesses, and for them, Microsoft launched Edge for Business, “the world’s first secure enterprise AI browser.” Its selling point is the combination of Microsoft Graph with Copilot Mode, and enterprise-level security, control, and compliance.
Copilot Models
Copilot combines OpenAI’s LLM models (at the time of writing, GPT-5) with real-time data from Bing’s search index through Microsoft’s own proprietary AI model Prometheus. It’s also trained on licensed and human-generated data.
Users are able to choose between different conversation modes according to the task they want to perform. Here’s what Copilot itself had to say about this when I asked it and used its “Quick response” mode:
Copilot vs Other Popular LLM Tools
| Tool | LLM (Latest Model) | Owned by | Real-time browsing + known search engine(s) it pulls data from | Training Data Knowledge cut-off date | Cites sources |
| Copilot | GPT-5* | Microsoft | Yes, via Bing | Current (no cut-off date) | Yes** |
| Gemini interface | Gemini 3 Pro | Yes, via Google | Jan 2025 | Yes | |
| AI Mode | Gemini 3 Pro with Deep Think, soon to be released to AI Ultra subscribers | Yes, via Google | Jan 2025 | Yes | |
| ChatGPT | GPT-5 | OpenAI | Yes, via BingMight occasionally scrape Google results through third-party tools, e.g. SERPAPI | June 2024 | Yes |
| Perplexity | Uses multiple models | Perplexity AI | Yes, via PerplexityBot + Google API + Bing API | Depends on the model | Yes |
| Claude | Claude Opus 4.5Claude Sonnet 4.5 Claude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | Yes, via Brave | Aug 2025 (Opus)July 2025 (Sonnet and Haiku) | Yes |
An important thing to note here is that while other LLM tools, like ChatGPT, can also access the web to perform real-time browsing, that feature often needs to be turned on or is plan-dependent, while it’s a deeply integrated part of Copilot. Grounded through Bing, Copilot cross-references its answers with web pages by default.
But what makes Copilot stand out most is how omnipresent it really is. It’s deeply embedded in Microsoft’s infrastructure, and it’s available to non-Microsoft users through the online interface, mobile apps, and GitHub Copilot.
Google is aiming for a similar type of integration with Gemini, Chrome, and Google Workspace, but it isn’t there yet.
*Microsoft 365 Copilot enterprise users can now also use Anthropic’s Claude models as an alternative to OpenAI’s models. Anthropic’s models are also available in Microsoft Foundry. They are not available in Copilot web functionalities (the interface, the Bing integration, and the Edge integration), Copilot Windows, and Copilot mobile apps. (Source)
**While Copilot does provide sources, it doesn’t always do so automatically. When I asked it about its conversation modes (illustrated earlier in this article), it didn’t provide Microsoft documentation or source links to back up its statements until I specifically asked for them.
External Influences
| Tool | Major investors | Major publisher partnerships |
| Copilot | Funded internally by Microsoft. | Axel Springer, Reuters, Hearst Magazines, USA Today Network, The Financial Times, The Associated Press. |
| Gemini | Funded internally by Google/Alphabet | Reddit (content/data licensing), News Corp, Associated Press (AP), Australia Associated Press (AAP), Stack Overflow |
| ChatGPT | Microsoft, Thrive Capital, SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, MGX, Dragoneer Investment Group, and others. | Associated Press (AP) (licensing), Axel Springer (POLITICO, Business Insider), Le Monde & Prisa Media, Financial Times, News Corp, AP News, Reddit (data/API) OpenAI, The Atlantic & Vox Media |
| Perplexity | Nat Friedman, IVP, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (Bezos Expeditions Fund), Databricks, Naval Ravikant, and others. | TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, Texas Tribune, WordPress.com, LA Times, The Independent, Le Monde, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, CNN, Condé Nast, The Washington Post, Le Figaro, RTL Germany (NTV, Stern) |
| Claude | Amazon, Google, Fidelity, Lightspeed Venture Partners, ICONIQ. | Wiley |
In September 2025, word got out that Microsoft was in talks with select US publishers about setting up a pilot program to launch a pay-per-use marketplace. Publishers would be compensated through this Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM) whenever their content is used by AI tools, starting with Copilot. This makes Microsoft the first to undertake such an initiative, as other AI companies have focused on closing licensing deals.
In the following months, Microsoft signed deals with Associated Press and People Inc. to join its PCM pre-launch.
It isn’t the company’s first foray into working with publishers either. In 2024, Microsoft launched Copilot Daily, an AI summary of news from sources such as Reuters with which Microsoft has partnerships.
How these partnerships will affect the answers shown by Copilot is yet to be seen.
What massively influences Copilot’s results is, of course, the fact that it relies on OpenAI’s GPT models. Microsoft and OpenAI renewed their partnership in October 2025, with Microsoft’s IP rights for OpenAI’s models extended through 2032.
Despite this extension, the new agreement includes some changes that loosen the ties between the two companies. OpenAI now no longer relies exclusively on Microsoft for computing services, and Microsoft extended its partnership with Anthropic, which guarantees users access to Claude through Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Foundry.
The Influence of Copilot on Search
Copilot’s web functionalities offer brands three new ways to get found:
- Through Copilot Mode in Edge
- Through the Copilot Search tab in Bing
- Through the Copilot interface at copilot.microsoft.com
All three Copilot functionalities contain citations whenever a web search has been used. When it hasn’t, the answer might not include citations, as we’ve seen earlier in this article. Brand mentions appear in the answer whenever relevant.
The way Copilot cites sources looks a bit different across platforms:
The Copilot interface is inconsistent in how it links to sources. Sometimes, citations appear immediately after the sentence they support and are then repeated as a scrollable list of blocks at the bottom of Copilot’s answer.
For location-related queries, Copilot may offer a map with links to and information about the local businesses listed at the top of its answer, without further citations. And it sometimes presents sources differently when you use different answer modes for the same prompt.
Copilot Search adds a “See all links” button that opens into a pop-up sidebar with a list of sources right at the top of its answer. Next is its answer with inline citations, and at the bottom of the answer follows another list of sources presented as blocks.
Ads can appear between the top links button and the answer, and link buttons to related images, videos, and more may appear to the top right of the answer. (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3)
Copilot in Edge appears as a sidebar when you click the Copilot logo in the right corner of the Edge toolbar. You can do this without needing to perform a search first. Links to sources can be indicated by superscript numbers that expand into a right-side panel within the sidebar when clicked, but in the case of our example search, a map with links appears just as it did in the Copilot interface.
It seems that answers by Copilot in Edge resemble those by the Copilot interface more than those by Copilot Search.
Should You Invest in Copilot SEO?
A study by Kevin Indig on transactional AI traffic showed that users coming from AI tools stay on sites on average a minute longer than users coming from Google Search, with Copilot users sticking around the longest. They also visit more pages.
That sounds promising, but Copilot might have an adoption issue. While Microsoft reported an increase in daily active Bing users and new-to-Bing users after the integration of Copilot, Microsoft’s search engine still receives significantly less traffic than Google does.
With 4.98% global browser market share in November 2025, Microsoft Edge comes in third, but still stays far behind Google’s Chrome (71.22%) and even Apple’s Safari (14.35%) browsers. (Source)
Official user numbers for copilot.microsoft.com aren’t available, but based on third-party analytics tools, Copilot’s interface also receives far less traffic than ChatGPT’s does, with a respective 998 million monthly visits vs 5.1 billion monthly visits for ChatGPT in December 2025. (Source)
You could argue that Copilot has a large built-in audience of Microsoft 365 and Azure users, but it’s unclear how many of those also use Copilot for search. On top of that, studies by CNBC and Gartner indicate that a growing number of companies are signing up for Copilot for Microsoft 365, but not yet fully deploying the tool.
It’s a good idea to start tracking Copilot traffic, mentions, and citations (more on that below), and to optimize your content with LLMs in general in mind.
How to Do SEO for Copilot
There is not much we know for certain about optimizing for mentions and citations in Copilot, specifically, but here are some things that are safe bets:
As Copilot pulls information directly from Bing, you want to make sure your company’s site is indexed there and ranks. Data from Kevin Indig also seems to indicate that brands that rank well in Bing are cited more in Copilot.
And if Copilot alone doesn’t seem worth the trouble, remember that ChatGPT, the biggest conversational LLM tool to date, also relies on Bing for its data, and that improving your Bing rankings might also positively affect your visibility in ChatGPT.
2. Implement general LLM SEO best practices
While Microsoft doesn’t tell marketers how to do Copilot SEO specifically, it did publish this general article on optimizing content for inclusion in AI Search Answers:
- Write clear, well-formatted content
- Offer in-depth information
- Keep sentences short
- Directly address questions
- Craft strong headings
- Technical SEO still matters
Implementing LLM best puts you in a good position to grow your LLM traffic and visibility as the search market share of these tools grows. It also allows you to optimize for the – in SEO terms – still rather insignificant Copilot while getting returns across the board.
| Copilot SEO largely overlaps with broader LLM SEO fundamentals, but platform specifics still matter—especially because Copilot is grounded in Bing and behaves differently from Google’s Gemini-driven surfaces or citation-heavy answer engines. If you’re building a cross-platform AI visibility strategy, compare Copilot with SEO for ChatGPT (another Bing-connected ecosystem), SEO for Gemini (AI Overviews and AI Mode inside Google Search), and SEO for Perplexity (a citation-first answer engine with different source selection dynamics). |
Tracking Copilot Performance
Tracking Traffic
Unfortunately, Bing Webmaster Tools does not currently track Copilot performance, and there is no way to separate Copilot Search vs Copilot Mode in Edge vs copilot.microsoft.com traffic.
Copilot Search and Copilot Mode traffic often appear as either Bing or Edge traffic or as direct traffic.
You can set up a report in GA4 in Looker Studio to track referral traffic from the Copilot interface. You’ll have to use a filter for Page Referrer and add this regex (that also includes other LLMs):
| ^https:\/\/(www\.meta\.ai|www\.perplexity\.ai|chat\.openai\.com|claude\.ai|chat\.mistral\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|bard\.google\.com|chatgpt\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|edgeservices\.bing\.com)(\/.*)?$ |
If you want an easier solution, use our free LLM dashboard. It lets you track referral traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT and Copilot, shows you which pages this traffic lands on, and allows you to track conversions from LLMs.
Tracking Mentions and Citations
New AI tracking tools keep popping up, but not all of them cover Copilot mentions and citations. Here are a few that do for smaller businesses:
- Alclicks
- Peec.ai
- LLMrefs
And for enterprises:
- Rankability Analyzer
- SE Ranking AI
- Profound
As organic clicks continue to drop and visibility has become the number one indicator of LLM search performance, you can’t rely on just tracking traffic anymore. Tracking mentions and citations, alongside conversions, is now more important than tracking organic click-throughs.
Aside from tracking how many times your brand gets mentioned in Copilot answers, you also want to keep an eye on how it gets mentioned. If snippets from negative reviews or inaccurate information about your company surface, you want to catch and address that before prospects do.
Optimize for LLMS, Optimize for Copilot
As part of the Microsoft ecosystem, Copilot’s influence is undeniable. When it comes to Search, it’s still bleak in comparison to how ChatGPT shook up the playing field.
Luckily, you can do SEO for Copilot by optimizing for LLMs in general. While all the big tools have their own particularities, they also have a set of best practices in common, as mentioned in this article.
At Flow Agency, we’re continuously monitoring the AI Search landscape. We analyze changes and run our own experiments to test our hypotheses. All so we can help companies like yours increase their visibility and stay ahead of the competition. Want to know more? Schedule a call today.
