Bing Webmaster Tools now shows which AI search topics your site appears in and where rivals are getting cited instead of you. Microsoft announced a beta feature called Topics Portfolio inside the AI Performance report, grouping the Bing AI citations your site receives into broader topics and listing queries within those topics where competing sites show up but yours does not.
What is Topics Portfolio and where do you find it?
Topics Portfolio lives in a new tab to the right of Citations & Pages inside the AI Performance section of Bing Webmaster Tools. It organizes the grounding queries (the search terms Bing’s AI uses to locate and cite content when generating answers in Copilot and Bing’s AI summary) where your site already appears, then surfaces additional queries in those same topic clusters where you are absent. The feature is only visible when Bing has sufficient data on a site; topics with too little site presence or ecosystem activity are not displayed, so smaller sites may see fewer entries or none at all.
What does each metric in the report mean?
Each topic row in the main table carries three numbers:
- Topic Size: an estimated total citation count across all sites for that topic during your selected time window, described by Microsoft as a measure of demand for that subject in AI search.
- Sites Cited: the approximate number of domains that appear for queries within the topic.
- Queries: the approximate count of distinct grounding queries inside the topic.
Below that table, a section called Top Opportunity Queries pulls the most notable gaps across all your topics: queries where other sites are cited but yours is not. Citation volumes in this list are given as ranges, not exact figures. Clicking any topic opens a detail page showing your current citations within it, plus its opportunity queries.
Data can be filtered over a one-, two-, or three-month window.
How does this differ from the June update?
AI Performance went into public preview in February. The June update added Topics, Intents, Citation Share, and a Compare view, but those Topics labels only grouped the grounding queries where a site was already cited. Compared with the June release, Topics Portfolio can show a total citation count across all sites at the topic level and list queries a site is not cited for. Microsoft says the portfolio view, ecosystem context, and opportunity queries are the things the report could not show before.
Citation Share, introduced in June, shows your percentage of all citations for a given grounding query. Bing states that Citation Share does not reveal competitor domain names and is designed to indicate your relative presence without exposing data about other domains.
What are the known limitations?
- Topics are generated by AI, so a query may be placed under a different label than you would expect.
- Branded searches can surface as opportunities. Microsoft’s own example: a shoe site saw a competitor’s brand name appear as an opportunity query inside its Running Shoes topic. Those entries are not actionable for most content teams.
- All figures are estimates. Microsoft’s guidance: “Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.”
- Bing’s AI Performance help page did not cover Topics Portfolio as of the Search Engine Journal report’s publication. The limits section of Bing’s announcement post is the primary written guidance for now.
- No exit date from beta has been given. Feedback submitted via the thumbs-up/thumbs-down controls on each query row goes to the team responsible for classification and opportunity selection.
What this means for AI-search visibility
Think of Topics Portfolio like a seating chart for an event you care about. It tells you which rooms your brand has a seat in and, more usefully, which rooms the conversation is already happening without you. In Hingewise’s view, that second list is the more useful one.
In Hingewise’s view, the most practically useful element here is not the citation counts but the opportunity query list. If a competitor is being cited for how to choose trail running shoes inside your topic cluster and you are not, that gap is now visible and named. That changes the conversation from we need more AI visibility (abstract) to we need a page that answers this specific query (actionable).
One consideration the source does not raise directly: the AI-generated topic labels introduce a layer of interpretation between you and the raw data. A query you would classify under “product comparison” may land under “buying guide” in Bing’s taxonomy. Before drawing firm conclusions about coverage gaps, it is worth spot-checking whether the topic labels match the intent you actually care about, especially for brands operating in niche verticals where AI classifiers may have less training signal.
Hingewise’s read is that tools like Topics Portfolio accelerate a shift already underway: AI-search performance is becoming its own reporting category, distinct from organic rankings. Brands that treat AI citation gaps the same way they have historically treated keyword ranking gaps, by diagnosing specifically where they are absent rather than optimizing broadly, may move faster than those waiting for a single “AI SEO score” to manage.
Before using Topics Portfolio data to brief a content team, a few steps worth taking first:
- Filter out branded competitor queries from the opportunity list; those are not gaps you can close with your own content.
- Cross-reference opportunity queries against your existing URL inventory to avoid creating duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
- Check whether the AI-assigned topic label matches the actual search intent before committing resources to a topic cluster.
- Compare findings across at least two time windows (for example, one month versus three months) to distinguish stable gaps from short-term fluctuations.
- Read Topic Size together with Sites Cited, which Bing describes as a sign of how crowded a topic is, before deciding which clusters to prioritize.
- Treat all citation volumes as directional only, in line with Microsoft’s own guidance, and avoid setting hard numeric targets based on ranges.
Topics Portfolio has no announced timeline for leaving beta. How Microsoft refines the AI topic classification, and whether it eventually adds domain-level competitor data to the opportunity view, are the developments most worth watching next.
Source: Search Engine Journal, Matt G. Southern, October 14, 2026; Bing Webmaster Blog, October 13, 2026
Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
This article was drafted with AI assistance from the sources cited above and checked against them before publishing. The "What this means for AI-search visibility" section is Hingewise's editorial analysis, built on the frameworks and positions we use in our GEO work. How we work: Editorial policy.