By Amara Osei

Microsoft has launched a beta feature called Topics Portfolio inside the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, and for the first time it lists queries where competitors are cited in AI answers and your site is not. Microsoft announced the feature without giving a date for it to leave beta.

The tool groups the queries a site is cited for in AI answers into broader topics. Bing calls these grounding queries — the search terms Bing's AI uses to locate and cite content in its answers, across Copilot, Bing's AI summary and select partner integrations.

There is a catch, and it is size-dependent. The new view appears only if Bing has enough data on the website. Topics with too little site presence or ecosystem activity will not display, so smaller sites may see fewer items — or none at all. Microsoft has not defined the data threshold.

What does Topics Portfolio show?

Topics Portfolio sits in a new tab to the right of Citations & Pages in the AI Performance section. The first screen shows topics where Bing considers the site to have a "meaningful" presence. Each topic carries three metrics:

• Topic Size — estimated total citation count across all sites for the topic over the chosen time frame; Bing describes it as a way to gauge demand through its AI
• Sites Cited — approximate number of sites appearing for queries in the topic
• Queries — approximate number of grounding queries within the topic

Below the topics table sits Top Opportunity Queries, a cross-topic list of queries where other sites are cited and yours is not. All citation volume figures in this list come as ranges, not exact counts.

Clicking a topic opens a detail page with the topic's size, the site's citations within it and the query count. One table lists the topic's queries where the site already appears; the other lists opportunity queries, again with citation ranges. Data can be viewed over one-, two- or three-month windows.

The takeaway: the report now shows both where you stand and where you are absent, at topic level.

How is this different from June?

AI Performance went into public preview in February. June's update introduced Topics, Intents, Citation Share and Compare. Those Topics labels grouped only the grounding queries where a site was already cited.

Topics Portfolio adds what the June release could not: a total across all sites at topic level, plus queries where the site is not cited. Microsoft said the portfolio view, ecosystem context and opportunity queries are the items the report could not show before.

Citation Share, also introduced in June, gives a site's percentage of all citations for a grounding query. Bing's help page states it does not reveal competitor domain names and shows no data about others.

The line between the two features matters: Citation Share is relative, Topics Portfolio is contextual, and only the latter names opportunity gaps.

What are the beta's limits?

The topics are generated by AI, so a query can land under a label the site owner would dispute. Branded searches may also appear as opportunities. Microsoft's own example: a shoe website saw its competitor's brand search listed as an opportunity under the Running Shoes topic.

Microsoft's guidance on the numbers is blunt: "Treat the numbers as directional signals for planning, not as a precise ledger."

Every opportunity query and topic row carries thumbs-up and thumbs-down feedback buttons. Microsoft says the ratings go to the team handling classification and opportunity selection and shape what gets fixed first — which is an implicit admission that the classification needs fixing.

In short: the data is useful for direction, not for tracking exact citation counts.

Why does this matter for marketers?

Opportunity queries hand content teams a concrete list of queries on their own topics where AI answers cite other sites and skip theirs. That makes the beta a working starting point for finding coverage gaps — provided teams filter out rival-brand queries that are irrelevant to their site.

The caveats are structural. Topic measurements are estimates. Opportunity volumes are ranges. The numbers allow approximate comparison among topics but will not support tracking specific citation counts over time.

Bing's AI Performance help page had not covered Topics Portfolio at the time of the announcement, leaving the limits section of Bing's post as the only written guidance. Until documentation catches up and a beta exit date appears, marketers get a directional gap map, not a measurement system.