· Notes for owners
Bing now shows which topics your site gets cited for
Bing added a Topics Portfolio view to AI Performance. Here is how an owner can read it, act on it, and avoid its traps.
On October 13, 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools added a beta feature called Topics Portfolio to its AI Performance report. It groups the queries where your site shows up in AI-generated answers into broader themes, and for each theme it shows how much demand there is, how crowded it is, and where other sites are cited and yours is not.
What it means for an owner
Before this, the report listed individual queries and the pages cited for each. You could see that a page was used in an answer, but not the shape of your presence as a whole. Now each topic row carries three measures:
- Topic Size: the approximate total citations across all sites, a rough read of how much AI Search demand the topic represents.
- Sites Cited: the approximate number of sites appearing, which tells you how crowded the topic is.
- Queries: the approximate number of distinct grounding queries in the topic.
Click into a topic and the queries split into two tables. Your Grounding Queries are the ones where your site already appears. Opportunity Queries are the ones where other sites appear and yours does not.
For an owner, that second table is a list of retrieval phrases the AI used where other sites are cited and yours is not. It is a planning list for what to fix or add on your own site, and Bing itself says to treat the results as directional.
It helps to remember what a grounding query is. In its announcement of AI Performance, Bing describes them as a sample of the phrases the AI used when retrieving cited pages. A sample, so not the whole picture.
What to do, in order
- See whether you have it. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, open AI Performance, and look for a Topics Portfolio tab next to Citations & Pages. Bing shows the tab when there is sufficient data for your site, so a missing tab tells you very little.
- Pick a window. Choose a period in the report. Start with the topics where your citations are already concentrated.
- Cross out the junk in Opportunity Queries. Bing says its topic classification is AI-generated and approximate, so a query may sit in a topic you would have labelled differently. A query that has no match with what you sell is not an opportunity.
- Check your own site before anything else. For each query left, look for a page you already have on it. If one exists, the job is improving that page, not writing a second one. Ahrefs, in its guide to content gaps, separates two kinds of gap: domain-level, where competitors cover a topic you do not, and page-level, where you both have a page and theirs ranks for more keywords. The fix differs for each.
- Compare with your own demand. Google's documentation on Search Console and Analytics data points you to the top pages and queries by clicks, and to the specific queries and pages that changed. If a topic Bing calls an opportunity matches nothing your customers actually search for, leave it.
- Hand over a short list. Give whoever touches your website a sheet with three columns: the query, the page you already have for it (if any), and a decision (new page, new section, or leave alone). Then use the feedback controls built into the view, which Bing invites.
One more note on step five. Google's guide to generative AI features describes the related queries a model fans out from a single question, so one customer question may show up as several related queries. Group them by the page that should answer them before you plan any new work.
The trap
Two mistakes are worth avoiding.
The first is reading a citation count as a ranking. The report does not show ranking or placement. A topic with a large Topic Size tells you how many citations flow through it across all sites, and says nothing about where you stand.
The second is exporting a gap list and writing straight from it. Ahrefs lists this as a trap: you may add a new page on a subject you already cover. Ahrefs also says a gap list has to be filtered for relevance before use, and refined if it runs past 100,000 keywords. The same human pass applies to Bing's list.
What is not known
Bing's announcement and the Ahrefs and Google guides explain how to find a gap. They do not state whether filling one brings traffic or citations. Bing does not say how its classification works beyond calling it AI-generated, and it labels the whole feature beta.
The sensible way to use it is as a small experiment. Change one page for one topic, wait for the next window, and look at your Grounding Queries again. If the page shows up there, you have learned something about your own site. If it does not, you have lost very little.
This kind of work sits between your website, your analytics and your accounts, and it rewards steady ownership. Our work is being your technology department: we map how your business actually runs, build the software that fits it, and run it for you. If you would like to talk through what that would look like for your firm, book a discovery call.