Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is the assistant most businesses have access to without realising it, because it ships inside software they already pay for. It is also the one with the clearest lever, and almost nobody pulls it.

There is no CopilotBot

This is the thing people get wrong. Microsoft does not run a separate crawler for Copilot. Copilot is grounded in Bing's index, which means your Copilot visibility is your Bing visibility.

The practical consequence is unusually direct: sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, import your settings from Google Search Console in one click, and use IndexNow so changes are picked up quickly rather than eventually.

It is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is the highest-leverage unglamorous task in this whole category.

The controls Microsoft gives you

Two meta tags, both often misunderstood.

noarchive keeps your page out of Copilot's generated answers entirely. nocache allows a snippet but not full use. Most businesses want neither — they are for publishers protecting paid content, not for a plumber who wants to be recommended.

Where Microsoft is genuinely ahead

Commerce. Copilot Checkout, brand agents and structured product feeds mean Microsoft has shipped more of the buy from you pillar than anyone. Whether that becomes mainstream is an open question, but if you sell products, this is the assistant where the transaction layer is furthest along.

That is worth knowing even if you never buy an ad: the product feed and structured data work that makes you eligible is the same work that makes you readable everywhere else.

On accuracy. Retrieval architectures change without announcement, and none of these companies publish full details. This page states what is documented, flags what is inferred, and avoids claiming internals nobody outside the company can verify. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.