Copilot cited our site 104,800 times in three months. Here's what it actually sent us

AI assistants talk about your business far more often than they send you visitors. We can show it with our own numbers. Bing's AI Performance report says Microsoft Copilot cited aliteq.com 104,800 times between 31 July and 29 October 2026. In October, Google Analytics recorded 3 visits from copilot.com. ChatGPT, which doesn't publish citation counts for site owners, sent 135 visits, and 25 of those people clicked through to a product we recommend. Here's what got cited, what it led to, and how to check the same for your business with free tools.

What Copilot cited

Bing Webmaster Tools has a free AI Performance report that counts how often Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft's partners cite your pages. For the three months to 29 October 2026 it showed 104,800 citations for our site, an average of 113 cited pages a day, and 710 different pages cited at least once.

The pages cited most:

The report also lists the questions behind the citations, which Bing calls grounding queries. Our top ones were "how to choose a gaming monitor" (814 citations), "nvfp4" (677), "how to boost fps" (594) and "are emulators illegal" (278).

The pattern was plain: Copilot leaned on how-to guides and direct answers to a question, the kind of page that says the answer in its first paragraph. A page that is cited for one question tends to keep getting cited for its close variants: "how to boost fps", "how to get better fps", "how to increase my fps" and "boost fps" all pointed to the same guide.

One more detail we didn't expect: Copilot kept citing some of our pages under old URLs that we had already redirected to new ones. If you ever change your URLs, keep the redirects in place for good.

What it sent us

Citations are a count of mentions, not visits. To see the visits, we looked at Google Analytics sessions by source for 1 to 30 October 2026:

Two things stand out:

• Copilot answers in place. Tens of thousands of citations turned into a handful of visits. People read the answer in Copilot and move on. The citation still puts your name in front of them, but don't expect it to show up as traffic.
• ChatGPT sends fewer people, but people with a decision to make. About one in five ChatGPT visitors clicked through to a product we recommend. No other source came close.

A caution on our numbers: Google Analytics doesn't see every visit, for example from visitors who decline cookies, so the real counts are higher. The pattern held across the month.

How to check your own business, for free

1. Bing Webmaster Tools. Add your site (it can import from Google Search Console), then open AI Performance. You'll see how often Copilot cites you, which pages and which questions. It costs nothing.
2. Google Analytics. Open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look for sources such as chatgpt.com, copilot.com, perplexity and gemini. That's who actually sends people.
3. Ask the assistants yourself. Type the questions your customers ask, such as "best [your product] for [your customer]" or "is [your brand] legit", into ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity. Note whether you're named, whether the facts are right, and who's named instead.

If you want this tracked for you

The free checks above take a few minutes a week. If you want the same questions checked every day across several assistants, that's what AI-visibility trackers do. Two we'd look at first, checked on the vendors' own pages on 31 October 2026:

• SE Ranking Core includes AI-visibility tracking for 25 prompts a day across 5 AI engines, on top of its rank tracking and site audit, with a 14-day trial that needs no card. For a small business it's the cheapest way to get both in one tool.
• Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit shows "how brands appear in AI-generated answers" and tracks prompts on platforms like Google AI Mode and ChatGPT. On its own it costs $99 a month for 25 tracked prompts, and it has no free trial.

More tools, compared by job, are on our AI Search for Business page. If you plan to create a lot of new pages to get cited, read what Google says about AI-written content first.