Copilot Citations Over a Quarter: 7 → 17 → 41. The «40 vs 0» Case, Continued
A quarter of Bing AI Performance data: 70 citations in 71 days, monthly growth — and silent streaks up to 10 days. How to read AI visibility without fooling yourself.
Three weeks ago I published the «40 citations vs 0» case: two of my projects, one gets pulled into Copilot’s sources, the other — zero. The window back then was six weeks. Now I have a full quarter: a Bing AI Performance export for the same cleaning-services project, April 26 through July 5. Below — the numbers you can’t see on the dashboard, and a couple of conclusions about how to measure AI visibility at all.
The quarter in one table
The Bing CSV is simple: date, Citations (mentions in answer sources), Cited Pages (how many distinct pages were cited). 71 days of data:
| Period | Citations | Days with citations |
|---|---|---|
| April (from the 26th, 5 days) | 7 | 1 |
| May | 17 | 9 |
| June | 41 | 12 |
| July (through the 5th, 5 days) | 5 | 2 |
| Total | 70 | 24 of 71 |
June vs May — 2.4× growth. The last four weeks vs the previous four — 37 against 20, nearly double. The trend that was a cautious «momentum is building» footnote in the June article has become a fact over the quarter.
No «optimize for Copilot» button was pressed during this period — it doesn’t exist. What ran was the usual cycle, the same one I described in the Alice AI report breakdown: service pages got strengthened, technical debt got cleaned, IndexNow pinged every update, Schema and llms.txt had been in place for months. AI visibility is a derivative of how your site sits in the index, and it grows together with it.
Waves: 47 silent days out of 71
The most instructive thing in the daily export is what monthly totals hide. Citations come in waves:
- April 26 — 7 citations in a single day. Then — 10 straight days of zeros.
- Late May — another streak of 7 zero days.
- The peak — 8 citations in one day (June 2). Total active days across the quarter — 24: two thirds of the calendar is empty.
Why: Copilot cites your site not on a schedule but when real people ask the right questions. In a narrow B2B niche demand is uneven — so citations will be choppy too. That’s a property of demand, not a technical problem with the site.
The practical consequence: a weekly snapshot of AI visibility lies in both directions. Land on a quiet week — «everything broke»; on a lucky one — «we took off». In this data, the week of June 8–14 produced 17 citations, while April 28 – May 4 produced exactly zero. Both are part of the same growing trend. A month is the minimum honest comparison step.
The narrow core: 1–2 pages a day
The second column, Cited Pages, looks boring and matters a lot: of 24 active days, 19 had one page cited and 5 had two. Not a single day with three or more.
Copilot builds answers not from «the site in general» but around a narrow core of pages — the ones sitting high in Bing’s index for specific topics. This mirrors the conclusion from my Yandex Alice export breakdown: Alice’s sources are the same pages that rank in regular search. The mechanics are the same across AI search engines; only the reports differ.
The working conclusion: strengthen the core instead of spreading effort thin. The pages that get cited are your representatives inside AI answers — their content, prices and facts must be immaculate.
How to run this measurement yourself
- Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance → export stats to CSV.
- Aggregate by month. Daily numbers are for understanding the rhythm, not for conclusions.
- Count active days and zero streaks — you’ll react more calmly to quiet weeks.
- Look at Cited Pages: how many pages actually work in answers. That’s your core — strengthen it first.
- Set a monthly repeat. Month-over-month is the only comparison you can trust here.
The full workflow for AI visibility is in the GEO checklist, and where this story started — in the «40 vs 0» case.
If you want to understand why AI engines cite your competitors instead of you — I can break it down in a one-off audit. Quick questions — Telegram @dimik90.