Everyone obsesses over ChatGPT and Perplexity. Meanwhile, Microsoft Copilot sits quietly inside Windows, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Bing, reaching hundreds of millions of users who never actively chose to use an AI search tool. It just showed up in their workflow.
That's what makes Copilot interesting. The audience didn't opt in. They're already there.
How Copilot works under the hood
Copilot is grounded in Bing. When a user asks Copilot a question, it searches Bing, processes the results, and generates an answer. This is different from ChatGPT, which sometimes answers from memory and sometimes searches the web. Copilot almost always searches, and it always searches Bing.
This means Copilot SEO is largely Bing SEO. If you rank well on Bing, you have a head start. If you've been ignoring Bing because Google drives most of your traffic, you're invisible to Copilot by default.
Key optimization tactics
Claim Bing Places for Business. This is the Copilot equivalent of Google Business Profile. For local queries, Bing Places data feeds directly into Copilot responses. If you're a local business and you haven't claimed your Bing Places listing, that's the highest-impact action you can take.
Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Many businesses submit sitemaps to Google Search Console and forget Bing exists. Bing needs to crawl and index your content before Copilot can use it.
Add Schema.org markup. Copilot benefits from structured data just like other AI tools. Organization, Product, FAQPage, and LocalBusiness schemas help Copilot understand what your business is and extract relevant information.
Optimize for Bing's ranking factors. Bing places more weight on exact-match keywords, social signals, and multimedia content than Google does. Fresh content matters too. Bing tends to favor recently updated pages.
Don't block Bingbot. Check your robots.txt. Some sites block Bingbot either intentionally or accidentally. If Bingbot can't crawl your site, Copilot can't recommend you.
Why most businesses miss this
The bias toward Google is understandable. Google has the majority of search market share. But Copilot's distribution is different. It's embedded in operating systems and productivity software that hundreds of millions of people use daily. A user doesn't need to visit bing.com. They just ask Copilot from their taskbar, their browser sidebar, or inside a Word document.
This passive reach means Copilot influences decisions in contexts where traditional search doesn't even enter the picture. Someone drafting a proposal in Word asks Copilot for tool recommendations. Someone browsing in Edge gets an AI-generated suggestion. These are touchpoints that Google and ChatGPT don't cover.
For a broader strategy that covers all AI platforms including Copilot, see our guide on AI search optimization. To understand where Copilot fits within the larger GEO landscape, that glossary entry covers the full picture.
