How does Microsoft Copilot decide which law firms to name?

The note describes a check on every prompt: whether the request needs grounding data from the web, and which model should answer. A question like "which lawyer in Phoenix handles wrongful termination?" needs current, local facts, so it gets a web search. Microsoft says Copilot centers its response on "high-ranking content from the web".

The Transparency Note doesn't name the search engine. The Bing Webmaster Guidelines do: they describe how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes and surfaces content across Bing search, Copilot and grounding results, and say these rely on the same core foundation. For a law firm, Copilot visibility is Bing visibility.

Microsoft's support page on how Bing ranks results names relevance, quality and credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and language, and page load time. For location it says Bing considers the searcher's country and city. It also says websites can't pay to improve their organic positions.

IndexNow

IndexNow is a free, open protocol that tells participating search engines a URL was added, updated or removed. Bing prefers submissions as they happen over big batches. Many website platforms support it through a setting or plugin; otherwise a key file of 8 to 128 characters goes on the site and changed URLs are submitted with it.

Sitemaps with honest dates

Bing's July 2025 post says lastmod is a key freshness signal and should use the full ISO 8601 date and time. It also says Bing ignores changefreq and priority. Setting lastmod to the moment the sitemap was generated, rather than when the page changed, is a mistake Bing calls out.

How often Bing reads it

Bing says it fetches a sitemap as soon as it's submitted in Bing Webmaster Tools or found in robots.txt, then typically at least once a day. When a firm moves offices, the sitemap and IndexNow are how Bing hears about the changed pages quickly.

When we publish a page on a client site, IndexNow is pinged the same day. It's one of the few places where a firm can tell an AI tool's source index directly that something changed.

1. 1

   Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools

   Bing lets you import a verified site straight from Google Search Console, sitemaps included. Otherwise verify with a DNS record, a meta tag or an XML file. Bing says data usually takes about 48 hours to appear.

2. 2

   Submit the sitemap

   Submit it in Bing Webmaster Tools and add a Sitemap line to robots.txt. Check that it lists only the canonical address of each page, with real last-modified dates.

3. 3

   Turn on IndexNow

   Through the platform's setting or a plugin, or a key file plus submissions. From then on, every new or edited page is reported as it's published.

4. 4

   Check the tags and crawler access

   Look at the robots meta tags on the home page and two practice pages for NOARCHIVE, NOCACHE or NOINDEX. Confirm robots.txt and the firewall let Bingbot in.

5. 5

   Claim Bing Places

   Claim or create the listing, use the firm's exact name, real phone, address and hours, and pick the right category.

6. 6

   Open the AI Performance report

   Note the starting numbers: citations, cited pages and grounding queries. That's the baseline every later month is compared against.

Our clearest AI search result is in ChatGPT: one family law firm now shows up first there, adding 50 to 100 calls a month over the last three months. Bing Webmaster Tools, IndexNow and Bing Places are part of how we set up AI search work, because the Microsoft side supports more than one tool. Our ChatGPT guide explains that connection.

Bing's guidelines also warn against tactics: content written to trigger citations, keyword stuffing, mass-generated pages and attempts to manipulate the language models behind Copilot can cost visibility. A new business law firm that spent six months on a clean, consistent presence is the opposite approach, and it's the one Bing describes rewarding. We build that into the websites we make, and we don't sell SEO as a separate service.