Bing Webmaster Tools is about to expand its AI performance reporting, according to a LinkedIn comment from Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel posted on June 4. The announcement is a roadmap signal, not a shipped update. The timing still matters: it lands while Google builds out its own AI performance reporting inside Search Console, which has been reaching site owners in limited access.
The exchange started when practitioner Greg Bernhardt suggested that Bing Webmaster Tools could stay ahead of Google Search Console by offering API export for its AI Performance report. Fabrice Canel, Microsoft’s principal program manager for Bing crawling and indexing, replied: “Please to help, and more coming… sooner than later.” That is the full public signal. No feature list, no release date, no specification of what “more” covers.
What Bing already offers is meaningful context here. Microsoft launched AI performance reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools several months ago, ahead of Google’s comparable reporting, and the tool has received incremental additions since its initial release. Site owners with Bing Webmaster Tools access can already see how their pages perform within Bing’s AI-driven surfaces, including Copilot responses that draw on indexed content. Search Engine Roundtable, which first covered the Canel comment, has documented each successive expansion of the feature over the past several months.
The gap between the two platforms is real, though the value of that gap depends on what additional features actually ship. The most consequential capability would be click data tied to AI citations: knowing not just that a page appeared in a Copilot response, but whether that appearance produced a visit. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz noted this directly, expressing doubt that Bing would include click-level data in the expansion. Both Google and Bing have strong incentives to withhold granular click data from AI-answer surfaces, since surfacing it clearly would expose the traffic cost of generative answers to site owners.
For teams measuring AI visibility across platforms, the current state looks like this: Bing Webmaster Tools has a head start and a confirmed expansion signal; Google Search Console’s AI performance reporting is still reaching site owners in limited access. Neither platform currently gives practitioners what they actually need, which is query-level impression and click data for AI surfaces comparable to what Search Console provides for classic organic results.
The practical constraint is audience share. Bing’s AI surfaces (Copilot and Bing Chat) account for a fraction of the query volume that Google’s AI Overviews handle. Monitoring Bing AI performance is a legitimate due-diligence step for enterprise and B2B teams, where Bing’s share is meaningfully higher, but it is not a substitute for Google-side measurement.
What teams should do now is straightforward. Set up or audit Bing Webmaster Tools access for all properties, verify that the AI Performance report is returning data, and bookmark the feature so the next update registers against a baseline. When Canel’s promised expansion ships, teams with existing access and historical data will have comparison points that late adopters will not.
For most practitioners, the more urgent action is tracking the Google Search Console AI report rollout. As that limited access widens, the data fields it exposes will define what optimization levers exist on the Google side, and that is where the majority of AI-answer traffic is concentrated.
Reported by Search Engine Roundtable on 2026-06-04, based on a LinkedIn comment by Microsoft’s Fabrice Canel.
