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Bing Copilot · § 1.5.1 · How-to
Bing Webmaster Tools on Squarespace
Bing Copilot grounds its answers in the classical Bing index5, which means Bing Webmaster Tools is the floor of every Copilot citation play. Verify via the meta tag on Business plan and above, or CNAME on current Personal. Submit https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml — the path Squarespace auto-emits. Then wait two weeks and open the AI Performance report3 to confirm citations are landing.
This leaf is the operational walkthrough. The meta tag flow most third-party walkthroughs cover, the CNAME flow the Personal plan needs, the sitemap-submission step, and the four Bing-specific gotchas that trip first-time setups on Squarespace.
§01TL;DR
TL;DR
Add the site at bing.com/webmasters. Verify with the meta tag method in Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header on any code-injection-capable plan, or with a CNAME record at your domain provider on current Personal plan. Submit the auto-emitted sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Open the AI Performance report after two weeks to confirm Copilot citations are flowing. Total time on a clean install: roughly 20 minutes, plus the DNS propagation window if you take the CNAME path.
Bing Webmaster Tools is the floor of every Bing Copilot optimisation play because Copilot's grounding layer reads from the same Bing index Bingbot populates — if your site is not in that index, Copilot cannot cite you. The rest of this leaf walks each step with the Squarespace-specific notes that the canonical Squarespace help article1 and Microsoft's own onboarding checklist2 assume you already know.
§02Why
Why Webmaster Tools is the floor of Copilot work
Microsoft's own documentation states the grounding chain explicitly: Microsoft 365 Copilot uses generated search queries sent to the Bing search service to ground responses in web data. The Bing search service reads from the Bing search index. The Bing search index is populated by Bingbot. If your Squarespace site is not in that index, Copilot cannot cite you. Webmaster Tools is the surface where you confirm presence, monitor crawl, and now — since 11 February 2026 — read the per-URL citation feedback the AI Performance dashboard publishes.
The AI Performance report3 is the lever that makes this work measurable. No other major AI search provider publishes per-URL citation data directly to webmasters in 2026 — not OpenAI for ChatGPT, not Google for AI Overviews, not Perplexity, not Anthropic for Claude. Microsoft shipped the dashboard as a public preview on 11 February 2026 with four core metrics: total citations across Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated summaries in Bing, average unique cited pages per day, sample grounding queries (the internal search phrases Copilot writes to retrieve content), and a per-URL citation activity table. The optimisation work earns measurable feedback within weeks, not months.
§03Meta tag
Verify with the meta tag (Business+ and legacy Personal)
The meta tag method is the fastest path and works on any Squarespace plan that supports Code Injection. Sign in to bing.com/webmasters, add the property, copy the full meta tag from the verification screen, paste it into Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header in Squarespace, save, return to Bing, click Verify. Total time on a clean property: about three minutes. Squarespace's canonical help article documents the meta tag flow directly.
The plans that ship Code Injection cover most active accounts1: Core, Business, Plus, Advanced, Commerce, and the legacy Personal plan that pre-dated the 2022 plan restructure. If you signed up for Personal after 2022, Code Injection is locked and you need the CNAME path in the next section.
HTMLThe meta tag Bing gives you — paste into Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header
<!-- Bing Webmaster Tools site verification --><meta name="msvalidate.01" content="YOUR-VERIFICATION-CODE" />
Squarespace caches header injections through its CDN, which means verification sometimes does not register on the first Verify click even though the tag is correctly pasted. Wait 60 seconds, try again. If it still fails after three attempts, open the live page in a private browser window and view source — the meta tag should appear in the <head>. If it does not, the paste did not save; redo the Code Injection step.
§04CNAME
Verify with CNAME (current Personal plan)
Current Personal plan does not include Code Injection, so the meta tag method is closed. Switch the Bing verification screen to the CNAME option. Bing displays a hostname and a target value. Add a CNAME record at your domain provider — not inside Squarespace's UI — pointing the hostname Bing gave at the target value Bing gave. DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours, after which return to Bing and click Verify.
The domain provider step is the part most third-party walkthroughs skip and the part that confuses first-time Personal-plan owners. If you bought your domain through Squarespace, the DNS settings live inside Squarespace's domain settings, but the CNAME record itself still needs to be added there — not in a Code Injection field. If you bought your domain through Google Domains, GoDaddy, or any other provider, the CNAME goes at that provider's DNS panel. Verification fails if the record propagation has not completed; wait the full 48 hours before opening a support ticket.
§05Sitemap
Submit the Squarespace sitemap
Squarespace auto-emits the sitemap at /sitemap.xml on every site, on every plan. In Bing Webmaster Tools, go to Sitemaps and submit the full URL — https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Bing reads the file within minutes for new sites and re-reads it on a schedule (typically every few days) thereafter. The discovered URL count Bing reports should match the page count Squarespace shows in Settings > SEO, give or take noindex-tagged pages which Squarespace omits from the sitemap automatically.
If the URL count mismatches significantly after a 48-hour window, the cause is usually one of three things: noindex tags on pages you did not realise were excluded, password-protected pages (Squarespace removes these from the sitemap), or a site-wide search-engine block in Settings > Crawlers. The third one is a quick check and the most common cause — the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" checkbox is sometimes left on from a development phase.
§06Crawl stats
Read the crawl stats panel
Crawl Stats in Bing Webmaster Tools shows how often Bingbot has visited the site, how many pages it has crawled per day, and the response codes those crawls returned. A healthy Squarespace site should show steady daily crawl activity (10-50 pages per day on a small site, more on a large one) with overwhelmingly 200-status responses. Spikes in 4xx or 5xx responses are the early warning that something on the platform is misbehaving — a recent template change, a broken redirect, or a noindex propagation issue.
Microsoft's Bing Webmaster API6 exposes the same crawl-stat data programmatically if you want to wire it into a monitoring spreadsheet. For most Squarespace owners the in-tool dashboard is enough; review weekly during the first month, then monthly. The pattern to watch for is gradual decline in pages crawled per day — that signals Bing is treating the site as low-priority and the AI Performance report will follow downward.
§07AI Performance
Open the AI Performance report
The AI Performance report is the new dashboard Microsoft launched on 11 February 2026 as a public preview. It tracks citations across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations. Four core metrics: total citations during the selected time frame, average cited pages per day, sample grounding queries (the internal phrases the AI writes to retrieve content), and a per-URL citation activity table. Wait two weeks after Webmaster Tools verification before expecting meaningful data.
The dashboard is under the AI Performance tab in the left navigation of Bing Webmaster Tools. The grounding queries column is the most actionable piece — it shows the exact phrasings Copilot is internally writing to surface your content, which is the closest thing to a query-level intent map any AI engine publishes in 2026. Pair that with the per-URL table and you have a precise picture of which pages and which question shapes are working.
What to look for in AI Performance
2026-02-11
AI Performance launched in public preview — the first AI citation report any major engine publishes.
Four issues catch Squarespace owners during Bing Webmaster setup more than anywhere else. The AI exclusion checkbox does not affect Bingbot, the XML file verification method does not work because the platform blocks root-level uploads, the Personal plan CNAME step needs the domain provider rather than Squarespace's own UI, and the sitemap URL count diverges from Squarespace's page count when noindex tags or password protections are silently filtering pages out.
The AI exclusion checkbox does not affect Bingbot. Bingbot is not on Squarespace's 26-bot AI exclusion list4. Toggle the AI checkbox however you want; Bing crawl access is unaffected. Owners who blocked AI bots in 2024 do not need to undo it to win Copilot citations.
XML file verification is closed. Squarespace does not allow root-level file uploads, so the XML file method that Microsoft's onboarding checklist lists as an option is not available. Use meta tag or CNAME.
Personal-plan CNAME goes at the domain provider. Not in Squarespace's panel. Even if you bought the domain through Squarespace, the CNAME record itself goes in Squarespace's domain DNS settings — not in any Code Injection field that does not exist on Personal anyway.
Sitemap URL count diverges from page count when filtering is active. Noindex tags, password-protected pages, and the site-wide "Discourage search engines" toggle each remove URLs from the auto-emitted sitemap silently. Check all three before opening a Bing support ticket.
