Microsoft is putting Google’s own naming convention on its search experience before deciding whether to keep it. An AI MODE tab is now surfacing more often inside Bing’s results, alongside the standard All, Images, Videos and Maps tabs, and Edge is separately testing a dedicated AI Mode button in its address bar. Both routes still lead to the same product Microsoft’s documentation calls Copilot Search, and the company has not confirmed a rename.
The tests were spotted by Venkat at Search Engine Watch, who first flagged Bing’s AI MODE tab earlier in the week and has now documented the Edge counterpart. In Bing, clicking AI MODE sends users to bing.com/copilotsearch, the identical destination the standard Copilot Search entry point uses. In Edge, when Bing is set as the default search engine, a new AI Mode button appears directly in the address bar. Clicking it opens suggested prompts, and a plus button lets users attach images or files before asking a question. From there, Edge’s AI Mode can route into Bing’s AI Mode tab, which again resolves to Copilot Search.
Nothing about the underlying retrieval or ranking system has changed. What changed is the label attached to the entry point, and that label happens to match the name Google uses for its own generative answer surface inside Search. Microsoft has not announced any plan to rename Copilot Search, and its support documentation still uses that name exclusively, so treating this as a launch or a branding decision would get ahead of the evidence. These are interface tests, the kind Microsoft runs on a subset of traffic before deciding whether to ship them broadly, and they could just as easily be rolled back as expanded.
The naming choice itself is the more interesting signal for search teams to track. When a competitor adopts the exact product vocabulary a rival popularized, it tends to mean one of two things: either the label has become the generic term users already search for, or the company wants to borrow the recognition Google built around “AI Mode” without waiting to build its own. Either reading points toward Microsoft treating “AI Mode” as a category name, not a proprietary one, which matters for how publishers think about optimizing for it.
For SEO and GEO practitioners, the practical takeaway is that Bing and Edge are becoming a second generative answer surface worth monitoring independently of Google’s AI Mode rollout, not a smaller echo of it. Citation behavior, source selection and query coverage inside Copilot Search do not necessarily mirror what shows up in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, and a page that earns a citation in one system will not automatically earn one in the other. Teams that have only been auditing their AI Overviews and AI Mode citation coverage should add a Bing AI Mode and Copilot Search check to that same audit, since Microsoft is visibly expanding the surface area where that citation competition now plays out.
Search Engine Watch (Venkat) reported the Bing and Edge AI Mode tests on September 27, 2026.
