How to rank in Microsoft Copilot

By the Variask team · Updated

In short

Microsoft Copilot grounds its answers in Bing search results. To appear in Copilot, let Bingbot crawl your site, verify it in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and use IndexNow for new pages, make sure your key pages are indexed and rank in Bing, and publish clear answers to the questions your buyers ask at work.

Key facts

  • Copilot relies on Bing's index for live answers.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools shows crawl and index problems.
  • IndexNow tells Bing about new and changed pages right away.
  • Copilot is built into Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365.

Step by step

  1. 1Allow Bingbot in robots.txt and your firewall.
  2. 2Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
  3. 3Submit your sitemap there and fix crawl errors.
  4. 4Turn on IndexNow, or ping it when pages change.
  5. 5Check that your key pages are indexed and rank in Bing.
  6. 6Publish answer first pages for business questions in your category.
  7. 7Track Copilot answers next to ChatGPT, because they often differ.

Put this into practice with Variask Site health, Variask AI visibility and the free sitemap checker for AI. See Variask pricing or read the Variask FAQ.

Put it into practice

Do this with Variask

Questions

Ranking in Microsoft Copilot:
common questions

No. Copilot uses OpenAI and Microsoft models but is a separate product grounded in Bing, so it can name different brands.

A simple way to tell Bing and other search engines that a page was added or changed, so it is crawled sooner. Many CMS platforms and plugins support it.

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