News & analysis
Bing Flags Queries Where AI Cites Other Sites Instead of Yours
Bing Webmaster Tools has added a beta feature called Topics Portfolio that groups AI search citations by topic and surfaces queries where other sites are cited and yours is not.
By Roomer Editorial · · 3 min read
What is Topics Portfolio?
Microsoft has added a beta feature to Bing Webmaster Tools called Topics Portfolio, inside the existing AI Performance report. It groups the queries your site gets cited for in AI answers into broader topics, then lists queries within those topics where other sites are cited and yours is not.
Bing calls these search terms "grounding queries." They're what Bing's AI uses to locate and cite content in Copilot, Bing's AI summary, and some partner integrations.
The feature lives in a new tab next to Citations & Pages. It only appears if Bing has enough data on your site, so smaller sites may see fewer topics listed, or none at all.
How does the data break down?
Each topic comes with three metrics: Topic Size (an estimated total citation count across all sites for that topic), Sites Cited (how many sites appear for queries in the topic), and Queries (how many distinct grounding queries exist in it).
Below that sits a Top Opportunity Queries list, pulling queries from across your topics where other sites are cited and you aren't. Citation volume in this list is shown as a range, not a fixed number.
Click into a topic and you get a detail page: topic size, your citations, query count, and two tables — queries where you already appear, and opportunity queries where you don't.
You can view all of this over a one-, two-, or three-month window.
This builds on the June release, which introduced Topics, Intents, Citation Share, and Compare. Those earlier Topics groupings only covered queries where your site was already cited. Topics Portfolio adds the total across all sites at the topic level, plus the list of queries you're missing entirely. Citation Share, also from June, shows your percentage of citations for a query without naming competitor domains.
What are the catches?
Topics are generated by AI, so a query might land under a label you wouldn't have chosen yourself. Branded searches can also show up as opportunities — Microsoft's own example was a shoe brand finding a competitor's name listed as an opportunity under "Running Shoes."
That's Bing's own framing for how to read these numbers. Topic measurements are estimates. Opportunity volumes are ranges, useful for comparing topics against each other but not for tracking a specific citation count over time.
Bing's AI Performance help page hasn't been updated to cover Topics Portfolio yet, so the limitations section of the announcement stands as the main written guidance for now. There's no stated date for when the feature leaves beta. Each topic and opportunity query has a thumbs up/down control, and Microsoft says that feedback goes to the team deciding what gets fixed first.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is a visibility tool, not a booking tool, but it matters for anyone publishing travel content that AI search engines are already pulling from. If you've written about "best hotels in Lisbon" and Bing's AI is citing other sites for that exact phrasing while skipping yours, Topics Portfolio is built to show you that gap.
The branded-query noise is real. A creator covering "Porto boutique hotels" might find a big OTA's brand name sitting in their opportunity list, which isn't a gap worth chasing. Ignore anything that isn't a content gap you can actually fill with a page you control.
Roomer Editorial's view: treat Topics Portfolio as a signal to check, not a task list to clear. The opportunity queries are a starting point for seeing where AI answers are already citing travel sites on topics you cover. If you're running your own site on Roomer, built from your videos with bookable pages and commissions you keep in full, this is one more reason that owning your pages — rather than relying only on social reach — is the thing that lets you act on a gap like this at all. You can't fix a citation gap on a platform you don't control.
Roomer Editorial's view: before chasing any opportunity query, check whether you already have a page close to the topic. Updating an existing post with more specific detail — neighborhood names, price ranges, booking links — often closes a gap faster than writing something new from scratch. Spend the time on pages tied to places you've actually covered on video, since that's the content your own site can actually rank and get cited for.
Check your own travel topics in Bing Webmaster Tools if you're indexed there, and treat any opportunity query as a prompt to see whether you have a page worth citing — not a guarantee that filling it will move anything.
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-webmaster-tools-topics-portfolio-ai-performance/592874/
