Microsoft on Oct. 13 began showing website owners the exact A.I. search queries where their competitors are cited and they’re not. The feature, called Topics Portfolio, launched in beta inside the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, and it quietly rewires how publishers are supposed to understand their own absence from Copilot and Bing answers.

Until now, the central problem of A.I. search has been legibility. Most businesses are missing from A.I. answers entirely, and the ones that aren’t rarely know why. The AI Performance report, in public preview since Feb. 10, told site owners how often their own pages were grounded in A.I. responses. It didn’t tell them what they were losing.

Topics Portfolio does. In a post authored by Krishna Madhavan, Saral Nigam, and Vivek Jain, Microsoft describes the tab as surfacing “the strongest queries across your whole portfolio where other sites appear and yours does not.” Queries are clustered into topics, with examples given as “football, taxes or AI Chatbots,” and a “Top Opportunity Queries” list names the specific grounding terms where rivals were cited instead. Citation volumes come as ranges, not integers; the date window tops out at three months.

The caveats are real. Microsoft tells users to “treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger” and notes that A.I.-generated topic classification “can occasionally be imperfect.” Matt G. Southern of Search Engine Journal, who said the feature will “hand content teams a list of queries about their own topics where AI answers reference other sites, but do not reference theirs,” also flagged that opportunity lists can include rival-brand queries. Sites below an unpublished presence threshold won’t see the tab.

Still, the strategic import is hard to miss. Google’s A.I. increasingly writes the first line of a brand’s story for most searchers, and Google’s own Search Console A.I. performance report still omits query-level data entirely, per PPC Land. Microsoft, the distant No. 2 in search, is doing what challengers have always done in platform fights: giving the supply side something the incumbent won’t. The 1996 Telecommunications Act produced the same dynamic when regional carriers were forced to open their lines; the party with less to lose discloses first.

No date has been set for Topics Portfolio to leave beta. The directional-signal framing suggests Microsoft isn’t yet ready to be audited on precision. Content teams, meanwhile, now have a list.

Sources