Bing Citation Share Measures a Query's Source List, Not a Rank
Bing's preview metric is the share of citations your site holds for one grounding query, without showing rival domains.
Direct answer
Bing defines Citation Share as the percentage of citations for one grounding query that point at your site. Microsoft says it is an observational metric and does not reveal competitor domains or traffic share.
Bing Webmaster Tools added a preview of four AI Performance views: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare. Citation Share is the one that changes how a citation count should be read.
Total citations say how often a site's URLs showed up as sources. Citation Share says what fraction of the citations for one grounding query belonged to that site. Bing calculates it as your citations divided by all citations shown for that same query, across sites. The Bing post says this is meant to show how much of the source list you occupied, not whether you ranked.
What the number refuses to be
Microsoft calls Citation Share observational. It does not reveal competitor domains, does not represent traffic share, and is not a quality score. Citation totals can still move because models change, pages go stale, partners refresh, or people ask about something else. Compare, the fourth view, lays a previous period on the same chart so a publisher can see the line move without treating the share as a rank.
Intents group the grounding queries into broader jobs, such as informational or commercial. Topics cluster them. Those labels sit beside the share figure. None of them is a click count.
Source: Bing, AI visibility insights.
FAQ
- What else shipped in that preview?
- Intents, Topics, and Compare. Compare overlays an earlier period on the current citation chart.
- Does Citation Share rank pages?
- Microsoft says no. It does not expose a competitive scoreboard or a quality score.