Bing Copilot for Local Business: The Underrated AI Traffic Source
Most marketers obsess over ChatGPT and Google AI Overview. Bing Copilot has 100M+ monthly users and far less competition. It's the easiest AI engine for a local business to win in.
Bing's user base is more transactional than people think.
Bing skews older, more enterprise, and more commercial than Google. Bing users convert at higher rates on most B2B and high-ticket queries. Copilot inherits that audience.
For a Bay Area professional services business, dentists, lawyers, CPAs, financial advisors, getting cited by Copilot is often more valuable per impression than equivalent ChatGPT placement.
Bing Webmaster Tools is your free analytics source.
Bing Webmaster Tools (free, separate from Google Search Console) tells you how often Copilot cited your site, which queries it cited you on, and which pages got referrer traffic from Copilot answers.
Most local businesses don't have this configured. Setting it up takes 20 minutes. Verify your site, submit your sitemap, then watch the Copilot citation data accumulate.
Bing rewards structured data even more than Google does.
Bing's documentation explicitly recommends Schema.org markup for AI features. Copilot citations correlate strongly with sites that have FAQPage, Article, and LocalBusiness schema in place.
If you've been doing schema work for Google, you're already 90% of the way to Copilot. The remaining 10% is making sure your schema validates cleanly in Bing's Markup Validator (different from Google's Rich Results Test).
Bing Places ≠ Google Business Profile, but matters.
Bing maintains a separate local business directory called Bing Places. Most small businesses haven't claimed theirs. The information is auto-populated from public records, often with errors. Copilot pulls from this directory for many local queries.
Claim your Bing Places listing. Verify hours, phone, address, categories. Add photos. It takes 30 minutes and earns you a measurable lift in Copilot answers for local queries.
Bing Copilot citations are visible to humans.
When Copilot generates an answer, it shows the source URLs as numbered footnotes. Users can click them. Unlike some AI engines that hide their sources, Copilot makes citation traffic measurable and clickable.
That's the unlock: a citation in Copilot is closer to a referral link than a citation in ChatGPT. Track Copilot referrer traffic in your analytics, it's a clean signal of AEO effectiveness.
Tracked queries, schema deployment, citation monitoring, monthly reporting. For Bay Area businesses serious about being cited in AI answers.
Talk to Eric →