Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella for Microsoft's AI assistants: the consumer chat experience on GPT and Bing, and the 365 Copilot embedded across Office.
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's umbrella brand for its AI assistants. The consumer Copilot — formerly known as Bing Chat — is a web-grounded chat experience powered primarily by OpenAI's GPT family. Microsoft 365 Copilot is the enterprise version, embedded across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. GitHub Copilot is the developer-focused product. Despite shared branding, each is a distinct product with its own retrieval, grounding and pricing.
The Copilot product family
| Product | Where it lives | Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot (consumer) | copilot.microsoft.com, Windows taskbar, Edge sidebar, mobile apps | General consumers |
| Copilot Pro | Paid consumer tier with priority access and Office integration | Power users |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Embedded in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams | Enterprise users on M365 |
| Copilot for Sales / Service / Finance | Role-specific Dynamics 365 surfaces | Enterprise function teams |
| GitHub Copilot | IDEs, GitHub.com | Developers |
How Copilot search works
The consumer Copilot grounds answers in live Bing search results. A user query triggers a Bing search, results are summarised by an OpenAI model, and citations appear inline as numbered links. Because Copilot rides on Bing's index, optimising for Bing organic ranking is the foundation of optimising for Copilot citations.
Copilot vs. ChatGPT Search vs. Google AIO
| Dimension | Copilot | ChatGPT Search | Google AIO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Underlying index | Bing | OpenAI's index | |
| Default behaviour | Searches by default | Triggered by query intent | Triggered by eligibility |
| Distribution | Bundled with Windows and Edge | ChatGPT.com | Google Search |
Why Copilot matters for AEO
Microsoft has aggressively distributed Copilot across the Windows install base, the Edge browser and the Microsoft 365 customer base. Even with single-digit consumer search share, Copilot's enterprise reach makes it a meaningful surface for B2B brands. Bing-driven AI answers also influence enterprise procurement, where Edge and Microsoft 365 are common defaults.
How to be visible in Copilot
- Get indexed by Bing. Submit your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing visibility is the prerequisite for Copilot citations.
- Allow Bingbot and the relevant AI crawlers in robots.txt.
- Use IndexNow to push freshness signals to Bing immediately on publish.
- Lead with the answer. Copilot's summarisation favours self-contained, declarative passages.
- Track Copilot prompts separately. Bing organic visibility and Copilot citation visibility are correlated but not identical.
Frequently asked questions
Is Copilot the same as Bing Chat?
Bing Chat was rebranded to Copilot in late 2023. The product evolved but the core idea — Bing-grounded chat powered by GPT — is unchanged.
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot search the public web?
By default it works against the user's tenant data — emails, files, chats. Web grounding can be enabled, in which case it pulls Bing results similarly to consumer Copilot.
What's the difference between Copilot and ChatGPT?
Both use OpenAI models. ChatGPT is OpenAI's own product with its own search infrastructure. Copilot is Microsoft's product, grounded in Bing, with deep distribution across Windows and Microsoft 365.
Related Terms
ChatGPT Search
ChatGPT Search is OpenAI's web-connected mode inside ChatGPT. It returns conversational answers grounded in live web results, with inline citations.
What Is an AI Search Engine?
AI search engines synthesise an answer instead of returning a list of links. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are the most-used examples.
Google Gemini
Google Gemini is the multimodal model family from Google DeepMind. It powers AI Overviews, the Gemini assistant, and most generative features across Google's products.
Anthropic Claude
Claude is Anthropic's family of large language models. It is known for long-form reasoning, a careful tone, and the Constitutional AI training approach.
What Is a Featured Snippet?
A featured snippet is the short answer Google promotes to the top of the results, lifted from a ranking page as a paragraph, list, or table.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of becoming the cited source inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, not just a blue link on Google.
