Bing Webmaster Tools now shows which themes your AI citations cluster around, and which related queries send citations to competitors instead. Microsoft added the beta, named Topics Portfolio, to the AI Performance report, Search Engine Journal reported on October 13. Search Engine Roundtable also covered the launch, quoting the Bing team’s announcement.
The feature rolls up grounding queries into broader thematic clusters. Grounding queries are the searches Bing’s AI runs to find pages worth citing in Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and select partner integrations. Microsoft’s own examples of clusters include football, taxes, and AI chatbots.
Access is gated by data volume. Bing shows the view only when it holds enough information about a site, and it hides topics where the site’s presence or the surrounding activity is thin. Smaller publishers may see short lists, or no tab at all.
The tab is placed next to the existing Citations & Pages view. Its first screen lists topics where Bing considers your presence meaningful, with three columns per topic. Topic Size estimates the citation count summed over every site in the chosen period, which Microsoft frames as a read on AI search demand. Sites Cited approximates how many sites appear for the topic’s queries, a gauge of how crowded it is. Queries approximates how many distinct grounding queries the topic contains.
Beneath that table sits Top Opportunity Queries, a cross-topic list of queries where other sites are cited and yours is not. Citation volumes there appear as ranges. Opening a topic shows its size, your citations, and its query count, then splits the queries into two tables: those where you already appear and those that are opportunities. Data can be viewed across one, two, or three months.
The June release already offered four tools: Compare, Citation Share, Intents, and Topics. Back then, Topics only clustered queries that had already earned your site a citation. The new version adds a topic-level total across all sites and names queries where you are absent. Citation Share still reports your percentage of citations for a grounding query, and Bing’s help page says it does not reveal competitor domains.
Microsoft is open about the beta’s limits. Topics are generated by AI, so a query can land under a label you would not choose. Branded searches can also surface as opportunities. Microsoft’s example is a shoe retailer that saw a competitor’s brand search listed under Running Shoes. Its guidance: “Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.”
Each topic and opportunity row carries thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Microsoft says those ratings go to the team that handles classification and opportunity selection, and they shape what gets fixed first.
Several gaps remain. Search Engine Roundtable noted that click data is not included. Bing’s post offers no timeline for ending the beta, and the AI Performance help page did not yet describe Topics Portfolio when Search Engine Journal wrote its report. Until that page is updated, Bing’s post is the only written guidance.
The practical use is gap-finding, not reporting. Read the opportunity list, strike the rival-brand queries, then sort what remains by whether your site has a page that genuinely answers each one. Topic Size can then rank the gaps, since a crowded, high-demand topic where you are absent matters more than a quiet one.
Teams that already track citations in Bing’s earlier reports should add this view to their planning review and treat range-based volumes as a way to rank topics against each other. Anyone who needs exact citation counts will still have to look elsewhere.
Based on reporting by Matt G. Southern at Search Engine Journal, published October 13, 2026, with additional detail from Search Engine Roundtable.
