Copilot (Bing Copilot)

Copilot is Microsoft's AI-search surface embedded in Bing and Edge, blending conversational answers with traditional Bing search results and citations. It draws on Bing's existing index and ranking signals, giving it a retrieval profile closer to conventional search authority weighting than to Perplexity's freshness-driven approach.

Why it matters

Copilot's default placement inside Edge and Windows gives it a distinct enterprise and desktop-default user base that's easy to overlook when a visibility program focuses only on ChatGPT and Perplexity. Because it inherits Bing's ranking signals, a brand that already performs well in traditional Bing SEO has a head start on Copilot citations that doesn't automatically carry over to other engines.

Related terms

• Answer Engine

  An answer engine is an AI-powered system, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews, that responds to a query with a direct, synthesized answer and cited sources, rather than a ranked list of links a user has to click through to find their own answer.

• ChatGPT Search

  ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's web-grounded answer mode inside ChatGPT, which retrieves current web pages before generating a response and displays a source panel alongside the answer. It launched as a standalone feature in late 2024 and uses a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to build its citation index apart from GPTBot's model-training crawl.