What Are Microsoft Copilot and Partners?
When a ranking on this site reports AI citations served, the figure comes from one place: Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report, which counts references made by Microsoft Copilot and its partner surfaces. This page is the full accounting of what that phrase covers, so the number on a ranking page can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The one thing to understand
This is not a list of roughly thirty places to optimize for. It is one place: the Bing index, reached through Bing’s web index and Grounding with Bing Search, with roughly thirty distribution windows on top of it. Earning a citation once can place you in all of them.
Microsoft tracks the whole set centrally and reports it as a single total, which is why no per-surface breakdown of your own citations exists: not from Microsoft, and not from us.
The scale behind the number
On this page
1. Copilot surfaces that cite external URLs
These web-ground and render clickable source links. Following the August to September 2026 merger, several are collapsing into one unified Copilot app.
| Surface | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot (unified app) | Consumer and M365 Copilot merged into one app on web, iOS, Android, Windows and macOS | Confirmed |
| Copilot Search in Bing | AI answers on bing.com with a source list | Confirmed |
| Copilot in Edge | Sidebar, new tab, Journeys, Summarize, Compare Tabs, Study & Learn | Confirmed |
| Copilot on Windows | Taskbar “Ask Copilot”, Start, “Hey Copilot” voice, Vision | Confirmed |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Free web-grounded chat on any M365 plan. The one enterprise surface with documented citations. | Confirmed |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (paid) | Work data plus optional web search, admin controlled. No citations in the Word or PowerPoint pane. | Partial |
| Researcher agent | Deep-research agent with an explicit web-search toggle; cites sources | Confirmed |
| Analyst agent, Copilot Cowork | Agentic analysis and long-running work; web search on, with no user toggle | Confirmed |
| Copilot Studio agents | Custom agents using open web search or Bing Custom Search; returns cited sites. Off by default. | Confirmed |
| GitHub Copilot | Bing web search since February 2025; model-native search added February 2026 | Confirmed |
| Copilot Vision | Screen and camera grounding, answering through the same Bing-backed stack | Confirmed |
| Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central | “Enable Bing Search” toggle, off by default. Visible URL citations unconfirmed. | Partial |
| Copilot Pages | Canvas spun out of a chat answer; inherits its citations. Not documented by Microsoft. | Unverified |
2. Copilot-branded, but not a citation surface
These carry Copilot branding and ground on tenant or first-party data rather than the open web. They do not belong in a reach claim, and none of them can produce a citation for an external page.
- Security Copilot
- Copilot in Fabric and Power BI
- Microsoft Copilot in Azure: first-party documentation only
- Copilot Notebooks
- Copilot for Sales
- Copilot for Service and Finance
- Dragon Copilot
- The Copilot pane inside Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook
3. Microsoft surfaces on the same stack, not Copilot-branded
| Surface | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Bing.com | Classic results pages plus AI summaries | Confirmed |
| Microsoft Edge (default browsing) | Copilot Mode was retired in May 2026; its AI features are now built into standard Edge | Confirmed |
| MSN and Microsoft Start | Microsoft content surface; feeds Copilot personalization. A Copilot-branded citing surface is unconfirmed. | Partial |
| Azure AI Foundry “Web Search” tool | Grounding with Bing and Bing Custom Search. The business channel behind a long tail of agents. | Confirmed |
| Windows Search web results | Historically Bing-backed. Not re-verified for 2026. | Unverified |
| Publisher Content Marketplace | Live pilot licensing marketplace: grounds answers in paid content from AP, Hearst, Condé Nast, Vox and USA TODAY. | Partial |
4. Partners: search engines serving the Bing index
These run on contract syndication rather than the public API, which is why the 2025 API retirement left them untouched.
| Partner | Relationship | Status |
|---|---|---|
| DuckDuckGo | Largest syndication partner; direct Microsoft contract, explicitly exempted from the 2025 API retirement | Confirmed |
| Yahoo Search | Bing-syndicated since 2009, non-exclusive since 2015 | Confirmed |
| Yahoo Scout | Launched Jan 2026: Claude generates, Bing retrieves. First demand-side Marketplace partner. | Confirmed |
| AOL Search | Fully Bing-powered since 2015; same ownership as Yahoo | Confirmed |
| Ecosia | Bing plus Google and EUSP; shrinking as it builds its own Staan index | Partial |
| Startpage | Google-primary, also queries Bing as a secondary source only | Partial |
| Swisscows | Bing for general web, own index for German | Partial |
| Qwant | Migrated mostly to Staan, its joint index with Ecosia; residual Bing use | Departed |
| Small search engines | Lycos, Oscobo, Ekoru, MetaGer and Dogpile. Small or partial Bing consumers, at low volume. | Partial |
5. Partners: AI assistants grounding on Bing
| Assistant | Relationship | Status |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Search | Bing for URL discovery plus OAI-SearchBot. Trending away as OpenAI builds its own index. | Partial |
| Yahoo Scout | Grounding with Bing Search API | Confirmed |
| Any Azure AI Foundry agent | Enterprise assistants built on the Web Search tool, an unenumerable long tail | Confirmed |
| Perplexity | Own index of roughly 5 billion URLs since the API retirement; residual Bing fallback at most | Departed |
6. Explicitly not in this bucket
These are the common mistakes. Each runs its own crawler or rents retrieval from Brave, Google or Perplexity, so reaching them takes separate work and none of them contributes to the citation figure on our ranking pages.
- Brave Search: own index since 2023
- Mojeek, Kagi, Presearch
- Meta AI
- Claude: Brave
- Mistral Le Chat: Brave
- Google Gemini
- Apple Siri and Spotlight: Gemini from 2026
- Snapchat: Perplexity
- ServiceNow: Gemini
- Amazon Bedrock and Alexa+: AWS web search
- Neeva: defunct
7. What changed, and what it means
August 2025: the Bing Search APIs were retired outright
Cheap programmatic access to the Bing index ended. The replacement, Grounding with Bing Search, costs between 40% and 483% more and returns model-consumed chunks with mandatory citation display rather than raw results. Perplexity, Ecosia, Qwant and You.com all built or bought their way out. Contract partners such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo were untouched.
The bucket is consolidating, not expanding
WhatsApp Copilot, Edge Copilot Mode, Deep Research, Copilot Podcasts and Group Chats have all been retired, and two Copilot apps became one in August 2026. A count of surfaces is a worse guide to reach here than it looks, because the surfaces keep merging while the index behind them stays the same.
Enterprise citations are now selectively suppressible
Since 4 August 2026, administrators can exclude specific domains from Microsoft 365 Copilot web grounding, on top of the existing all-or-nothing web-search policy. A single tenant can make any site uncitable inside its own organization.
Concentration is the whole argument
A single Bing outage in May 2024 simultaneously downed DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Copilot and ChatGPT search. That is the clearest available evidence that these are one source with many windows, not many sources.
The practical read
The enterprise surface is the differentiated prize. Bing’s roughly 5% share of consumer search badly understates what this bucket is worth: the reach that matters is 30 million or more paid M365 Copilot seats inside 90% of the Fortune 500, plus a taskbar entry point on 1.6 billion Windows devices.
If you sell business to business, this bucket is worth disproportionately more than its search share implies. If you sell to consumers, it is worth considerably less.
8. How this was compiled
Compiled 19 August 2026 from Microsoft Learn, the Bing and Microsoft 365 blogs, Microsoft FY26 earnings disclosures, and reporting from Search Engine Land, TechCrunch, The Register and ppc.land.
Microsoft publishes no official roster for “Copilots and partners”, and no customer list exists for Grounding with Bing Search. The partner side of this page is therefore assembled from primary partner documentation plus press reporting, not from a vendor list. Every row marked Partial or Unverified should be checked before it goes into anyone’s deck, including ours.
Two limits worth stating plainly. Bing Webmaster Tools reports one aggregate total, so neither we nor anyone else can attribute a citation to a specific surface on this page. And the citation counts shown on our rankings are a dated snapshot rather than a live counter; the date is printed next to every figure.
Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us. Corrections to this page are handled the same way as corrections to a ranking.