Bing AI Performance and Google AI reports: how to read them

The two reports side by side

Both reports are free and both arrived in 2026, but they count different things:

A citation on Bing and an impression on Google are not the same event, so do not add them up or compare one with the other.

What one site’s reports look like

chunduai.com is a Chinese-language site we run that tests and ranks API relay services for AI models. This is what its two reports showed on 26 October 2026, with the three-month view selected.

Bing. The data started on 12 October. From then to 24 October:

• 363 citations, between 10 and 55 a day, and an average of 3 cited pages a day.
• Six cited pages. The ranking page took 205 citations, a tutorial page 123, the home page 23, and three other pages 12 between them. These add up to 363.
• Seven grounding queries, adding up to only 111 citations, because Bing shows a sample of them. Five of them:

The topic labels show why Bing calls them AI-generated: 中转站 means “relay service” here, but it is also the everyday word for an airport transfer, and two queries were filed under airports. The Topics tab did not appear for this site at all.

Google. Over the same three months the generative AI report showed 1 impression, on the home page on 20 October. The ordinary Performance report for web search showed 91 impressions and 4 clicks.

A new site. citeloop.ai went live on 19 October 2026. A week later its Bing AI Performance report showed 0 citations for 20 to 24 October, and Google’s generative AI report showed 0 impressions for 18 to 24 October.

Reading Bing’s AI Performance report

The numbers. Total citations counts every time your content was visibly referenced as a source. Cited pages is the number of different pages cited on a given day, and average cited pages is the daily average over your date range. Bing is explicit that none of this measures ranking, authority or importance.

Grounding queries. Bing describes them as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content it then cited. They are grouped phrases, not the questions people typed, and one query can map to several pages and the other way round. Click a query to see its pages, or a page to see its queries.

It is a sample. Bing says the data is “not a complete log”: very low activity may not show up, and totals can differ between the pages view, the queries view and the chart. That is exactly what chunduai.com’s 363 citations against 111 in the query list look like.

Intent, topic and citation share. Since June 2026 each grounding query carries:

• an intent, such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational or Learn and Solve;
• a topic that groups related queries;
• a citation share: your site’s percentage of all the citations shown across all sites for that same query.

Bing calls the labels AI/ML classifications that may be broad for niche subjects, as the airport example shows, and calls citation share “an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard”.

Compare overlays an earlier period on the current one, for example the last 30 days against the 30 before.

Topics Portfolio is a beta tab added on 13 October 2026. When a site has enough data, it lists topics with their size, the number of sites cited and the number of queries, plus opportunity queries: queries in your topics where other sites are cited and yours is not. Topic size, sites cited and queries are approximate, citation volumes for opportunity queries are shown as ranges, the classification is AI-generated, and a site with little data may see a short list or none.

Trends. Bing warns that changes in citation volume cannot be attributed to a specific cause, whether that is a content update, a model change or a shift in what people ask.

Reading Google’s generative AI report

• Impressions only. An impression is a link to your site shown in a generative AI feature on Google Search. There are no clicks, positions or queries. Clicks from AI features are counted in the ordinary Performance report under the “Web” search type, mixed with the rest of your search traffic.
• Breakdowns. Pages, countries, devices and dates. You can filter by text search or multimodal search, such as searching with a phone camera.
• Limits. The chart and table totals can differ, the usual 1,000-row limit applies, the newest data is shown as a dotted line while it is preliminary, and Search Labs experiments are left out.
• A missing report usually means the site has not had enough impressions in these features. If your site is excluded under Settings > Search generative AI, you get no impressions from them at all.

What to do with them

This is how we use the two reports on our own sites:

1. Start from the cited pages. A page that collects citations is one that AI answers already use as a source. On chunduai.com the ranking page took 205 of 363 citations, so it gets checked first: does it answer its grounding queries completely and keep its figures current?
2. Watch where queries land. A grounding query that is cited mainly through the home page or a list page suggests a dedicated page that answers that phrase directly.
3. Treat opportunity queries as a shortlist. Topics Portfolio’s opportunity queries are worth writing for only when they match what you actually do. Skip the mislabelled ones; nobody wants chunduai.com’s view on airport transfers.
4. No citations at all? Check access first. On Bing, make sure bingbot is not blocked and pages carry no NOARCHIVE, which keeps content out of Copilot answers, or NOCACHE, which limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. On Google, check for noindex and nosnippet, and that your site is not excluded from Search generative AI. See the AI crawler list and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: how to appear and opt out.
5. Record, don’t conclude. Save the numbers each week. A new site starts at zero, as citeloop.ai did, and a single week’s change is not evidence that one edit worked. To ask AI assistants your buyers’ questions yourself, see how to measure LLM visibility.

Citeloop’s free GEO audit checks the access side from outside: whether robots.txt lets bingbot and Googlebot in, and whether your pages carry noindex, nosnippet or noarchive. It cannot see these two reports, which need your own Bing Webmaster Tools and Search Console accounts. To check whether crawlers really reach you, see how to verify Googlebot and AI crawlers reach your site.