Microsoft added a Topics Portfolio beta to Bing Webmaster Tools on October 13 that lists AI search queries where other sites get cited and yours does not.
According to Microsoft’s Bing team, the beta is a new tab inside the AI Performance report, sitting next to Citations & Pages. If you run a store and read Ecommerce Paradise, this changes one thing: you can now see which buyer questions AI answers settle with a competitor’s page instead of yours. Per PPC Land, it is the first release in that report to show data about other sites at all.
Below: what Microsoft shipped, how the report got here, what I think it is worth to a high-ticket store, and a five-step audit you can run before Black Friday. It also connects to the AI shopping changes I covered earlier this month, including Newegg turning on Google checkout inside Gemini.
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Bing Topics Portfolio Lists the AI Queries Where Rivals Get Cited
Microsoft published the announcement on October 13, 2026, under the title “Introducing Topics Portfolio (Beta) in AI Performance” on the Bing Webmaster blog. PPC Land credits the post to Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam and Vivek Jain of the Bing team.
The feature groups the grounding queries where your site appears into AI-classified topics. Grounding queries are the phrases the AI used to retrieve content for an answer. Microsoft’s February documentation described them as “the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers.”
The topic table has four columns, according to Microsoft:
Topic is “a broad thematic cluster of related grounding queries where your site appears.” Topic Size is the approximate total citations across all sites for that topic over the selected period, a proxy for how much AI search demand it represents. Sites Cited is the approximate number of sites appearing for the topic’s queries, which tells you how crowded it is. Queries is the approximate number of distinct grounding queries inside the topic.
Below the table sits the part that matters. Top Opportunity Queries lists the strongest queries across your portfolio where other sites appear and yours does not, with citation volumes shown as ranges instead of exact counts. Click into a topic and you get a detail page with three KPI cards (Topic Size, your own citations, query count) and two tables, Your Grounding Queries and Opportunity Queries.
Microsoft says the tab appears only “if there is sufficient data for your site.” You can pick one-, two- or three-month windows. Each topic row and each opportunity query has thumbs up and thumbs down controls that feed Microsoft’s classification work.
Microsoft lists its own limits. Topic classification is AI-generated and can occasionally be inaccurate. Topics with too little site presence or activity are hidden, so smaller sites may see fewer topics or none. Branded queries can show up as opportunities. All the topic figures are approximate. The authors advise: “Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger.”
PPC Land adds three observations Microsoft’s post does not make. Topic Size counts citations, not searches, so it is not a search-volume number. Competitors are not named; Sites Cited is only a count. And Microsoft does not say whether the figures on other sites are sampled. PPC Land also notes that Google’s Search Console AI report offers no grounding queries and no competitor-citation data, as of its October 13 write-up.
Bing’s AI Performance Report: Feb. 10 Launch to the Oct. 13 Topics Tab
AI Performance entered public preview on February 10, 2026. The launch post listed total citations, average cited pages per day, a sample of grounding queries, page-level citation activity and a visibility timeline. It covers Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Microsoft called the grounding query list a sample of overall citation activity, not a full export.
On March 23, per PPC Land, Microsoft added query-to-page mapping in both directions, so you could see which pages a query cited and which queries cited a page. Until this week, every number in the report described your own site.
The middle steps matter because Microsoft announced them in pieces. At SEO Week in New York on April 27, according to Launchcodex, Microsoft previewed four reporting features, including a citation share metric. Launchcodex reported that Microsoft had not said how the share is calculated. On June 16, per Techwyse, four preview features went global: Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare. Citation Share measures the share of citations a site holds out of all citations shown for the same grounding query, and Microsoft said it is observational, not a ranking, traffic share or quality score.
So Citation Share already hinted at competition, but only as a percentage on queries where you appear. Topics Portfolio is the first view that surfaces queries where you do not appear at all. That is a different kind of information.
Why the staged rollout matters to you: each release has widened the question the report can answer. February answered whether you get cited. March answered which page gets cited for which query. June answered how big your share is on queries where you appear. October answers where you are missing. That is the order a store owner would ask the questions in, and it means the report is now useful for planning content, not only for checking it.
The counterpoint is scale. Bing is a small slice of search. PPC Land cites Datos putting Bing’s US share at 3.2% to 3.8% in early 2026, down from a 5.33% peak in December 2025. Bing’s AI surfaces are a subset of that. Third-party prompt-tracking tools estimate AI visibility from the outside, while Bing’s data reflects actual grounding activity, but the numbers on other sites are approximate.
Google has not matched it. Launchcodex reported that an “AI contribution pilot” appeared in Google’s support documentation on April 13, 2026, with no confirmed launch at the time of its update. Nothing I could verify today shows that changed. For related platform moves, see my post on Google’s UCP checkout hub in Merchant Center. I also covered Shopify letting AI agents submit orders.
What Bing Topics Portfolio Means for High-Ticket Store Owners
My read is that this report is a free list of content gaps, and the engine behind it matters less than the questions on it.
High-ticket buyers research before they spend $2,000 or more. They ask comparison questions, fit questions, delivery and installation questions, warranty questions. When an AI answer settles one of those with a competitor’s page, that competitor wrote the page you did not. Topic Size tells you how much of that is happening in a theme. Sites Cited tells you how many stores you are up against. A topic with big citation volume and few sites cited is the cheapest place to show up.
Read Sites Cited as a difficulty score you can compute in ten seconds. A topic with 8 sites cited means eight pages are fighting for the answer, and a store with a decent category page and one good guide can join them. A topic with 80 sites cited is a crowd, and I would only enter it with a page that has something the crowd lacks, like real installation photos, a delivery timeline or a spec table other stores skip. High-ticket categories are full of lazy supplier copy pasted across a hundred stores, which is the main reason a plain, specific page can win.
Think about which pages the gaps point to. The cheap fixes are on pages you already own: a product page missing dimensions, a collection page with two sentences of copy, a shipping policy buried in the footer. The expensive fixes are new buying guides. Do the cheap ones first. If you are choosing which niche to build next, the same lens works on my high-ticket niches list, because a niche where AI answers cite only a few thin sources is a niche with room.
Here is hypothetical math, not reported data. Say your average order is $3,000 at a 20% gross margin, which leaves $600 per sale before ads. A buying guide that costs $300 in writer time and design pays for itself on one extra sale. Ten guides cost $3,000 and need five extra sales to break even. That is a small bar, which is why I’d work the list instead of ignoring it, but it also tells you to pick six queries, not sixty.
Three scenarios, with thresholds I’d use:
First, the tab does not show for your store. That means Bing sees too little data, and it is not a verdict on your content. Check again next month and move on. Second, the list is mostly branded queries and competitor product names. Microsoft warns this can happen. Ignore those rows unless one of them names a product you sell. Third, the list shows non-branded category questions with a crowded Sites Cited count and high Topic Size. Those are your build queue. I’d treat anything the report calls a topic with a double-digit Sites Cited count as a fight and anything with a handful as an opening, though that cutoff is my own rule of thumb, not a Microsoft number.
Do not confuse citations with sales. Launchcodex repeats third-party figures that AI search visitors convert at 14.2% versus 2.8% for Google organic, and that AI referral traffic to US retail sites rose 693% year over year in the 2025 holiday season. Those are secondhand numbers from other firms and I have not checked the underlying studies. I would not plan a budget on them. Your own analytics will tell you more once citations turn into sessions.
I would also not rebuild a store around Bing’s 3% to 4% US share. The reason to care is that the grounding queries are a window into how AI systems break a buying question into searches. My opinion is that the questions transfer across engines even when the exact citations do not. Nobody has proven that, and Google gives you no equivalent data to test it with.
Validate every query before you write for it. Topic Size counts citations, not human searches, so run the theme through Semrush to see whether people search it in Google too. KWFinder is the cheaper pick when you only need difficulty and volume on a short list. For a deeper look at who ranks, I’d use Ahrefs.
The same logic sits behind my earlier note on Meta’s shopping agent ranking known merchants first. AI systems lean on sources they already trust. Pages that answer the question directly, on a domain that looks like a real business, are what get pulled in. That connects to my guide to ecommerce content mistakes that hurt conversions, because thin category pages are usually the gap.
Measurement is the weak spot. Bing tells you about citations, not clicks or revenue, so you need your own tracking to see whether a new page earns sessions. If you changed your tag setup recently, check it against my note on Google Tag Manager skipping the extra gtag.js, and keep an eye on paid AI placements too. I covered one measured estimate that ChatGPT ad clicks cost about 6x Google’s, which is one reason earning citations with a good page looks cheap by comparison.
Agents are the other reason to fix your product data now. Shopify has started exposing prices to shopping agents, which I wrote up in Shopify showing AI agents your compare-at prices. Clean specs, honest prices and real policies help in every one of these systems, and a Bing gap list is a free to-do list for them. For the bigger picture on running a lean store with AI help, read Claude for ecommerce.
The operator problem is time. A gap list is only useful if someone turns it into pages, fixes product copy, checks the results monthly and repeats. If that sounds like a job you do not want, that is exactly the work my team handles inside the turnkey done-for-you service.
Want a second set of eyes on which Bing gaps are worth filling in your niche? Get the coaching details →
Run a Bing Citation Gap Audit on Your Store Before Black Friday
Here are the five steps I’d run this week, in order:
- Verify your store domain in Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not, open AI Performance and look for the Topics Portfolio tab next to Citations & Pages. Set the window to three months so a thin store has the best chance of clearing the data threshold. If the tab is missing, write that down and recheck in 30 days.
- Copy the Top Opportunity Queries into a sheet and sort them into four buckets: comparison questions, spec and fit questions, shipping and install questions, and branded or competitor-named queries. Delete the fourth bucket unless it names a product you carry.
- Pick the six queries with the highest Topic Size and the fewest Sites Cited, then check each one for human search demand in SE Ranking or your tool of choice. If you want help grouping a long list, paste it into Claude and ask it to cluster by buyer intent, then spot-check the clusters yourself because Microsoft says its own classification can be wrong.
- Map each of the six to a page. A comparison query becomes a buying guide, a fit query becomes a spec table on the product page, a shipping query becomes a delivery section on your Shopify product template. Put the answer in plain page text near the top, not inside an image or a collapsed tab, and follow the page-level rules in my guide to turning Google Shopping clicks into sales.
- Mine your own inbox for the same questions. Support tickets in Gorgias show the exact wording buyers use. Replies to your Klaviyo flows do too. Anything that appears in both your tickets and the opportunity list jumps to the front. Log your starting citation count so you have a baseline.
Do this once now, then monthly. The report updates as Bing collects data, and a three-month window smooths the noise. Use a rank tracker from my best rank trackers roundup to watch the pages you publish. Review the Turnkey service details and email me with questions before ordering.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do I find Topics Portfolio?
Inside Bing Webmaster Tools, under AI Performance, as a tab next to Citations & Pages. Microsoft says it appears only when your site has enough data, per the October 13 announcement.
Does it name my competitors?
No. Per PPC Land, Sites Cited is only a count, so you see how crowded a topic is but not who is in it. You still have to open the AI answers yourself to see which stores are being cited.
Is Bing worth the effort if most of my traffic comes from Google?
Treat it as research, not a channel. PPC Land cites Datos at 3.2% to 3.8% US search share for Bing in early 2026. The value is the question list. For the Google side of AI shopping, see how AI Mode ads run through your existing campaigns.
Does Google offer anything similar?
Not as of PPC Land’s October 13 report, which says Search Console’s AI report has no grounding queries and no competitor-citation data. Launchcodex noted an unconfirmed Google pilot in April.
I am still building my first store. Should I care?
Not yet, because a new store may not have enough data for the tab to appear. Start with my guide to high-ticket dropshipping. Then grab my free niche list at ecommerceparadise.com/niches.
How often should I check it?
Monthly. Microsoft calls the numbers directional and approximate, so a daily check adds noise, not information. Compare the same three-month window each time.
Already have a store that needs these gaps filled and tracked every month? Want my team to scale the store you already have? See the scaling service →
Citation reports are new and they will keep changing. The habit worth building is simple: find the questions buyers ask, answer them on your own pages, and check the results monthly. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news coming through the day.
Related Articles
If this was useful, these go deeper:
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- Shopify Now Shows AI Agents Your Compare-At Prices
- ChatGPT Ad Clicks Cost 6x Google’s, Measured Estimates
- Claude for Ecommerce: How to Build a Leaner High-Ticket Business With AI
- Moz Alternatives 2026: 8 SEO Tools Compared on Price, Limits and Fit
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and world traveler from Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
He maintains homes in Seattle and Bali, spends most of the year overseas, and usually returns to Seattle for about a month each summer.
