Bing Topics Portfolio: Find and Prioritize AI Citation Gaps

By Rahul S., founder of SearchCounselCo. Checked October 16, 2026.

How to read the three Topics Portfolio views

Open Bing Webmaster Tools, select your site, and open AI Performance. Use the topic view when available. The walkthrough below interprets Microsoft’s public illustrations; it is not a test inside our account.

The parent report covers Microsoft Copilot, Bing AI summaries and selected partner integrations. Grounding queries are sampled retrieval phrases, rather than a complete log of user prompts. See Microsoft’s AI Performance explanation.

1. Portfolio landing: choose a relevant theme

The official portfolio illustration shows a topic table with Topic Size, Sites Cited and Queries, plus one-, two- and three-month options. Its tab reads “Topic Portfolio”; the announcement also uses “Topics Portfolio” and “Topics.”

Start with a theme your business can answer credibly. Record the selected property, period and label. A large theme outside your audience is a poor assignment, even when it appears near the top of the report.

2. Top Opportunity Queries: inspect the cross-topic list

The official opportunity-list illustration shows queries from multiple topics with citation ranges. This is a broader shortlist than the opportunities inside one selected topic.

Preserve the original phrase, language and range. Rewrite the phrase separately as a customer task. If you cannot explain the task, investigate before briefing a writer. A navigation request for another product may deserve rejection.

3. Topic detail: compare presence with opportunity

The official topic-detail illustration separates Your Grounding Queries from Opportunity Queries. Above them are Topic Size, your citations and Queries cards.

Review both sides before changing content. An opportunity phrase can overlap an existing answer expressed differently. The illustration’s Download control is visible, but we have not tested its export format or whether it exports every row.

What the numbers mean—and what they cannot tell you

Microsoft describes the beta’s aggregates as directional and its classification as imperfect. The portfolio is personalized to your site’s presence. Check the product definitions and limitations before comparing periods or making a budget decision.

Why a higher citation range may not establish growth

Consider fictional displays of 10,000–50,000 citations in one period and 20,000–100,000 in another comparable period. Their midpoints are 30,000 and 60,000, but that does not establish a 100% increase. Two very different histories fit those same numerical bands:

This is a mathematical illustration, not a reconstruction of Bing’s underlying data. Its aggregates are approximate; displayed bands are not statistical confidence intervals or guaranteed bounds on true activity. Preserve both displays and report that an exact change cannot be established. Check query identity, period and report scope before interpreting movement.

June Topics and October Topics Portfolio are different releases

Bing had already introduced Topics, Intents, Citation Share and Compare on June 16, 2026. October 13’s portfolio adds ecosystem context and opportunity discovery; it is not the first introduction of topic grouping. See the June feature announcement.

Do not divide your topic citations by an approximate Topic Size and label the result Bing’s official Citation Share. June’s documented metric concerns the same grounding query; the topic aggregates describe a different scope.

What to check when Topics Portfolio or a topic is missing

Microsoft says availability depends on sufficient site presence and ecosystem activity, without publishing a fixed eligibility threshold in the announcement. A missing topic or tab does not establish a penalty.

• Confirm the selected property and the reports you can access. Record the date, interface label and selected period.
• Separate a missing feature from an empty opportunity list. Capture the actual message rather than assigning a cause from an empty table.
• For an unexpected topic, inspect its phrases and use the available feedback controls. Do not reorganize your site around a classification you cannot substantiate.
• If the situation remains unclear, send the property, date, period and exact symptom through Bing’s feedback channel. Keep unsupported eligibility explanations out of the brief.

These are investigation steps, not a guaranteed way to unlock the beta. Changing a title or adding a keyword does not prove that a reporting threshold has been met.

How to prioritize one opportunity without inventing a score

1. Establish relevance. Name the intended reader, language and task. Reject unrelated login requests; investigate a legitimate comparison only when you can support it.
2. Find the current owner. Search your inventory and inspect candidate pages. Compare the answer in the body, not just its title.
3. Specify the contribution. Name the missing calculation, example, source or step. If the current answer is adequate, record “keep” and move on.
4. Choose the smallest useful action. Keep, clarify, refresh or create. Consider consolidation only after reviewing both pages and the redirect implications.
5. Set an acceptance check. Write what a reviewer must verify before assigning the work. Put evidence collection before writing when the evidence is missing.

Use business relevance, available evidence and delivery effort to order the surviving tasks. Approximate ecosystem counts do not establish how easy a citation will be to earn. Our content gap analysis guide covers the broader site-level method; this guide applies it to Bing’s report.

Completed example: keep the formula owner and clarify a related guide

Suppose that phrase reaches the review queue. The reader needs a definition, the correct denominator and a calculation. We inspected two plausible owners instead of immediately commissioning a new formula article.

This is a narrower finding than “the site lacks AI visibility content.” The calculation already has an owner. The useful work is resolving an ambiguity between related resources, then checking the published explanation.

The exact clarification we would make

Rename the related calculation to “Inclusion rate.” Explain that it measures the fraction of answer observations mentioning a brand. Define competitive share of voice separately against a named comparison set. Link readers needing the full calculation to the existing KPI guide.

A new Bing Topics Portfolio guide still has a separate job: teaching readers how to interpret this report and make a documented content decision. It should not absorb every general AI measurement query.

Inclusion rate, share of voice and Bing Citation Share use different denominators

The counts below are fictional and illustrate three different questions. They are not observed SearchCounselCo metrics or interchangeable ways of reporting the same result.

The first two rows use an explicit counting convention for our example. Other monitoring systems can define their samples differently. Preserve the method when comparing results. The third row follows Bing’s documented Citation Share denominator; do not infer its inputs from rounded topic ranges.

A zero denominator produces no usable percentage. Record it as unavailable and preserve the counts. Do not turn missing data into a measured zero or mix a Bing query percentage with a brand-monitoring sample.

Keep Microsoft Clarity’s Share of authority separate

Clarity’s Citation dashboard is a separate reporting surface. Its Share of authority documentation describes a daily, query-based inclusion rule: query-days without a citation to your domain are excluded. That population rule matters when comparing percentages.

Record the product, metric, query set, period and inclusion rules with each percentage. A similar metric name does not establish a comparable denominator. Do not copy a Clarity percentage into the Bing record and label it Bing Citation Share.

Copy a planning record that preserves the evidence

Use one record per reader task. Several phrases can belong to the same task and owner. This is a manual planning record, not Bing’s export schema or a scoring model.

Bing opportunity decision record

Observation date and reviewer:
Provenance: own account / official illustration / fictional input
Property, report surface and selected period:
Original topic, phrase, language and displayed range:
Capture or export reference; limitations:
Interpreted customer task and business relevance:
Preferred owner URL and current answer evidence:
Specific missing contribution, or reason to keep:
Action and reason:
Evidence needed before implementation:
Person responsible and exact proposed change:
Completion check:
Delivery state and change date:
Baseline, platform, period, unit and denominator:
Review date, observed result and alternative explanations:

If you use a download, inspect the actual file before automating it: record its columns, period, row count and whether the chosen view or filters affect the output. A button in an illustration does not establish those details. Keep absent fields marked unavailable.

How to review the work and assess AI-search visibility

Start with delivery: does the owner answer the intended question, support its claims and send the reader to a useful next step? Then review visibility and business results separately. The SEO analytics and reporting framework helps keep those questions distinct.

• Bing citation observation: preserve the property, query or topic, period, values and reporting surface. Check page-level activity separately when the question concerns a URL; a topic total is not proof of that page’s gain.
• Organic search performance: review the intended URL and relevant query cluster in Search Console. Keep the market, search type and comparison scope consistent.
• Referral and enquiry results: inspect measured visits and qualified actions separately. Our AI referral measurement guide covers that broader task; a citation alone does not identify a human visit.
• Review conditions: log changes to other pages, tracking, query sets and report settings. With sparse data, report counts and uncertainty before interpreting percentages.

If an opportunity disappears, verify what changed

Disappearance from an opportunity list alone does not establish that your planned page gained a citation. The announcement describes selected top-query lists, not a complete audit trail. Treat disappearance as a reason to investigate and look for positive evidence in the relevant report.

What would make this page eligible for Google AI answers?

Google says supporting links in AI Overviews and AI Mode must be indexed and snippet-eligible. It requires no special AI schema or text file and does not guarantee selection. See Google’s AI-feature guidance.

Our editorial approach is to provide standalone definitions, a source-backed metric comparison and an inspectable decision example. These make the explanation useful and easier to verify. They do not establish that Google will cite it.

A proper visibility check records the query, market, language, date, answer surface and actual cited URL. Observing a page in the organic results is not evidence that the AI answer cites it. Review implementation after publication; assess outcomes when the data supports a comparison, rather than promising a result by a fixed day.

Common questions about Bing Topics Portfolio

The one thing to do next

Complete one decision record using the actual current owner. State what it already answers, what is missing and what a reviewer must verify. If the answer is already adequate, keep it and choose another task.

For help prioritizing those decisions across a content inventory, our content strategy service provides a relevant next step.