I noticed that the Bing Webmaster Tool added a new AI Performance feature. It shows how many times your site’s content has been recommended by large AI models. But the page has no Chinese translation, so I’m a bit confused and don’t fully understand the metrics Total Citations and Avg. Cited Pages 😅.
I’m interested in these two terms because I found that Clarity is also rolling out a similar AI analytics feature. With GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) getting so popular, it’s worth understanding these metrics. It also helps with quantitative measurement: there are now companies in Yantai specifically offering GEO services, and our company purchased one of these services — it was quite expensive and lacked quantitative metrics. If Bing Webmaster can record this monitoring data to evaluate effectiveness, it would help avoid being misled.
Data source
Statistics from Microsoft Copilots and its partner services. Although Copilot on Windows isn’t usable domestically here, Bing search often shows AI suggestions at the top of search results, and those displays are likely included in this dataset.
Also, to understand these two metrics, first know the meaning of the word citation. This is my first time encountering the word “citation”; citation [saɪˈteɪʃənz] in Chinese means “引用.” Note the difference between an in-text citation and a reference: a citation (appearing within the body text) corresponds to a reference (usually placed at the end of the document, e.g., in a bibliography).
Total Citations metric
Total citations: the cumulative number of times your site’s content was shown as a “source” or “reference” in AI-generated answers during the selected time range.
- This is an exposure metric. Each time Copilot or Bing AI cites a piece of information from your webpage and includes a link in its reply (a footnote or source list), that counts as one citation.
- Note that this does not represent clicks; it represents the AI’s “trust” and usage frequency of your content. The higher the citation count, the more often AI pulls your content to support answers.
Avg. Cited Pages metric
Average cited pages: the average number of unique pages cited by AI per day during the selected period.
This is a coverage metric. It helps you determine whether AI is repeatedly pulling from just one or two “hit” pages, or whether it finds many pages across your site valuable.
- If this value is very low: your AI traffic is highly concentrated, propped up by only a few authoritative pages.
- If this value is very high: your site demonstrates broad topical authority; the AI deems many pages across your site worth referencing.
Summary
Total Citations focuses on quantity; Avg. Cited Pages focuses on diversity.
Grounding Queries
Grounding Queries are the baseline/supporting queries. At the bottom of the chart you’ll also see a Grounding Queries list showing keywords and their associated citation counts.
These keywords are not the raw questions users entered; they are the terms the AI used when doing background research in search engines to generate its answer.
About the Author 🌱
I am a developer from Yantai, Shandong, China. If you have any interesting topics or software development needs, feel free to email me at: zhongwei.sun2008@gmail.com for a chat, or follow my personal public account "Elephant Tools", See more contact information