Bing Shows Content Teams Where AI Answers Cite Other Sites

Bing’s new Topics Portfolio gives content marketers a way to find questions where AI answers cite other sites and leave theirs out. For a small B2B software team, that supplies a starting point for the next page update, before paying a writer to cover another broad topic.

The beta announced October 13 adds topic-wide context and missing-query lists to Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report. Its value depends on an editorial decision the dashboard can’t make: whether an apparent gap matters to someone who would buy the product.

Microsoft Bing’s announcement is jointly written by Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam, and Vivek Jain. They caution:

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

An uncited question gives the editor something to investigate. It doesn’t establish that the company needs a new article.

Start with the question underneath the topic

The June 16 reporting update already grouped queries into topics. October’s portfolio adds context across all cited sites and highlights queries where other sources appear without yours. This is an expansion of existing reporting, six days before this article, rather than a new measurement system launched today.

Grounding queries are the searches an AI system uses to find supporting material. They can differ from the customer’s original question. The report covers supported Microsoft AI experiences and selected partners; it doesn’t provide a complete view of every assistant’s answers.

That distinction matters when a writer receives a brief. A system’s search phrase is evidence of what it retrieved. The editor still has to connect it to a real customer problem. Our Claude page-format coverage examined that second step: matching an answer’s purpose to the question being asked.

Itay Malinski, founder and CEO of Aloha Digital, described their early use in an October 14 practitioner account. The agency filters exported queries, checks their connection to the client’s products, and looks at how well an existing page answers them. Some become updates. Others are discarded.

Their summary keeps the focus on the underlying questions:

“The best finds are often small.”

This is a service provider’s account of its own process. Aloha sells SEO and AI visibility services, and the essay doesn’t establish that following this workflow increases sales. Its illustrated store example is explicitly hypothetical.

A missing citation can be the right result

The tool still offers something useful: a bounded place to begin research. A marketer can inspect the underlying questions instead of commissioning content from a large topic label alone.

That list needs filtering. Bing warns that competing brands’ queries can appear as opportunities, classifications can be imperfect, and smaller sites may lack enough data to see the feature. A rival’s branded question can reasonably favor that rival. Filling every gap would spend the content budget on questions the company has little reason to answer.

Citation counts also need their own column. They aren’t searches by prospective customers, clicks to a website, or revenue. The earlier June announcement explicitly separated citation share from traffic share. A growing mention count doesn’t settle whether a content investment paid for itself.

For the person accountable for content and brand, the usable response is a short review of one relevant topic. Open its missing queries and match each plausible question to a specific buyer need. Check the existing page before assigning a new one. A page that partly answers the question gives the editor a narrower job than a blank brief.

Keep a reason beside every assignment, including the decision to skip. Our Typeface reporting on content quality raised the cost of letting visibility targets decide what gets published. Here, the approval should say what the buyer will understand better after the edit. Leave the brief unassigned until the editor can point to the explanation the page needs.