How does Microsoft Copilot select information to respond?

Microsoft Copilot selects its sources by consulting Bing's index in real time — the same mechanism used by ChatGPT when web browsing is active. This means the strategy for appearing in Copilot is essentially the same as for ChatGPT: correct Bing indexing, content structured for extraction, and releasing Microsoft's bots in robots.txt. For companies with strong Google presence but no Bing attention, Copilot is an unexplored visibility channel.

What Microsoft Copilot is and where it operates

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, integrated into Windows 11, the Edge browser, the Microsoft 365 suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams), and Bing. Depending on the usage context, it can access the user's internal documents (via Microsoft 365) or search for information on the web (via Bing). For AIO purposes, what matters is Copilot with web access — which uses Bing as an external information source.

Copilot and ChatGPT share part of the infrastructure (both are based on OpenAI models) and both use Bing for real-time search. The main difference is distribution: Copilot is integrated into the Windows operating system and the most used productivity applications in the corporate world, making it particularly relevant for B2B companies.

How Copilot retrieves and selects sources

Copilot's source retrieval process follows the same logic as ChatGPT with Browse enabled:

1. The user's question is processed and transformed into search queries
2. Bing returns ranked results with text snippets from each page
3. Copilot selects the most relevant snippets for the response
4. Sources are cited with links at the end of the response

The selection among Bing results favors the same signals that favor RAG extraction: direct answer at the start of the paragraph, concrete data, clear heading structure, and semantic match with the question's intent.

Why Bing is critical for Copilot visibility

Companies that have never registered their domain in Bing Webmaster Tools, have no sitemap submitted to Bing, or have pages with crawling errors on Bing are effectively invisible to Copilot. This is a significant strategic gap — especially for B2B companies, since Copilot is embedded in the tools that corporate teams use daily.

A quick diagnosis: access bing.com and search site:yourdomain.com. The number of pages indexed on Bing is usually much smaller than on Google for companies that have never specifically worked on Bing. Each unindexed page is a potential source that Copilot cannot access.

Microsoft bots that need to be allowed in robots.txt

For Copilot (and Bing) to crawl your content, the following user-agents need to be allowed in robots.txt:

• Bingbot — Bing's main indexing agent
• msnbot — Microsoft's legacy agent, still used in some contexts
• BingPreview — used to generate page previews in Bing

Additionally, for ChatGPT to access content via training: - GPTBot — OpenAI's crawling agent for model training

Checking whether these agents are blocked (intentionally or by generic settings) is the first step of any AI visibility diagnosis.

Copilot in the B2B context: why it matters more than it seems

The corporate environment — where Copilot is integrated into Office 365, Teams, and Windows — is exactly the context where B2B purchase decisions are researched. A manager who is in Teams and asks Copilot "which AIO agencies exist in Brazil?" is on a buying journey. If your company doesn't appear in the response because it's not indexed on Bing, the opportunity was lost before it started.

For B2B companies wanting visibility in these contexts, the AIO strategy needs to explicitly include the Bing layer — not as an accessory, but as a strategic channel.

FRT Digital includes Bing and Microsoft Copilot visibility diagnostics in the AIO Score audit. Learn about the AIO service to build presence across the main generative engines used by the corporate market.