For more than 25 years, SEO has been measured by one primary question:
Where does my website rank?
If you ranked well in Google or Bing, you expected customers to find your business.
That assumption is beginning to change.
Today, people are increasingly asking AI-powered search and answer engines questions like:
- Who is the best commercial cabling contractor?
- Which SEO company specializes in AI search?
- How do I optimize my website for ChatGPT?
- What should I do if I suspect money laundering?
- Who installs boundary fencing near me?
Instead of returning a list of webpages, AI systems generate answers.
Before they generate those answers, they retrieve evidence.
Recently, Microsoft released several significant announcements that signal where search is heading, including AI Performance reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools and new AI visibility metrics such as Citation Share, Topics, Intents, and Compare.
One observation from Microsoft’s announcements stood out.
For the first time, Microsoft now reports Search Performance and AI Performance separately.
That isn’t just a new dashboard.
It’s an acknowledgment that traditional search visibility and AI visibility are no longer the same thing.
Ranking Pages and Citing Evidence Are Different Jobs
In an excellent analysis published in Search Engine Journal, Duane Forrester, Founder and CEO of Unbound Answers and former Bing executive, summarized the significance of Microsoft’s direction with a simple statement:
“The company that owns a major web index just documented, in its own product, that ranking a page and citing a passage are different jobs.”
I believe that’s one of the most important observations made about search this year.
Traditional search engines rank webpages.
AI systems retrieve evidence.
Those are related processes, but they aren’t identical.
What We Observed When We Looked at the Data
When Microsoft released AI Performance reporting, I immediately wanted to compare it with the traditional Search Performance reports we already monitor for clients.
I wasn’t looking to prove a theory.
I wanted to answer one question:
Would the AI reports simply mirror traditional search, or would they tell us something different?
After comparing websites across several industries including professional services, legal, manufacturing, home services, and our own website, I noticed several patterns that caught my attention.
The Grounding Queries Didn’t Look Like Traditional Search Queries
The first thing I noticed was that Microsoft wasn’t reporting traditional keyword phrases.
Instead, it reported what it calls Grounding Queries.
When I compared those with the traditional Bing Search queries, they weren’t simply longer versions of the same keywords. Many of them read more like complete thoughts or detailed search intent.
For example, on our own website, one of the grounding queries wasn’t simply “AI SEO.” It was much more specific, describing the type of company someone was looking for.
That immediately made me wonder whether AI retrieval systems are organizing information around intent and meaning, rather than simply matching individual keywords.
I can’t say that’s true for every AI system, but it’s certainly what Microsoft’s data appears to suggest.
AI Frequently Retrieved Educational Content
Another thing that stood out surprised me.
Some of the most frequently cited pages weren’t necessarily homepages or service pages.
One legal website we analyzed was being cited for educational information explaining what someone should do if they suspect money laundering.
That isn’t a broad commercial keyword. It’s someone asking for guidance. That’s exactly how people use AI today. Instead of searching for “criminal defense attorney,” they ask complete questions.
The data suggests that content answering those questions may have opportunities to become supporting evidence in AI-generated answers.
Related Concepts Appeared Together
Another interesting observation came from one of our fencing clients.
Rather than seeing completely unrelated search phrases, we saw multiple variations centered around the same underlying concept—different ways of expressing similar fencing needs.
That isn’t enough to conclude that Microsoft’s systems are using entity-based retrieval. However, it does align with a broader trend we’ve been observing across AI search: meaning appears to matter more than exact wording.
It’s another reminder that writing naturally and covering a topic thoroughly may become more valuable than trying to optimize for one exact keyword phrase.
New Websites Are Already Appearing in AI Performance Reports
One question I was especially interested in was how long it takes for a newly launched website to begin appearing in Microsoft’s AI reporting.
Several of the websites we reviewed had launched within the past year, and a few had only recently gone live.
Despite that, Microsoft’s AI Performance reports were already showing citations for relevant business topics.
That’s encouraging.
It doesn’t prove that a new website will immediately earn AI citations, and it certainly doesn’t prove that our work alone caused those results. But it does suggest that businesses don’t necessarily need years of history before they can begin appearing as evidence within Microsoft’s AI ecosystem.
Why This Matters
Traditional SEO is still important.
Rankings still matter.
Organic traffic still matters.
But Microsoft’s announcements—and the data we’re now able to analyze—suggest businesses should begin measuring something else as well:
Are AI systems retrieving your content when people ask questions about your expertise?
That’s a different measurement from rankings.
And increasingly, it’s becoming an important one.
How We’re Responding
At Toto SEO, we’ve been evolving our process over the past year because we believe websites need to serve two audiences simultaneously:
- People.
- And the AI systems helping people discover businesses.
Instead of beginning with keywords, our process begins with knowledge.
We define the business, its services, audiences, terminology, expertise, and relationships before writing content.
From there, we build pages designed not only to rank in traditional search but also to communicate clearly enough that AI systems can retrieve, understand, cite, and recommend them.
We call this The AI Visibility Method.
Microsoft’s recent announcements don’t create that methodology.
They reinforce many of the same principles we’ve already been implementing.
Search Is Evolving Again
SEO isn’t disappearing.
It’s expanding.
Businesses will still care about rankings.
But they’ll also need to understand retrieval, grounding, citations, recommendations, and knowledge quality.
The companies that organize their expertise into clear, trustworthy, well-structured knowledge will be in the strongest position as AI-powered search continues to evolve.
The question is no longer just:
“Where do we rank?”
Increasingly, it’s becoming:
“When someone asks an AI system for a recommendation, does our business become part of the answer?”
References & Further Reading
Microsoft has published several important announcements describing these new AI capabilities:
- Announcing Microsoft Web IQ
https://blogs.bing.com/search/June-2026/Announcing-Microsoft-Web-IQ - Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (Public Preview)
https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview - New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share & Compare
https://blogs.bing.com/search/June-2026/New-AI-Visibility-Insights-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Intents-Topics-Citation-Share-Compare - The Evolving Role of the Index: From Ranking Pages to Supporting Answers
https://blogs.bing.com/search/May-2026/Evolving-role-of-the-index-From-ranking-pages-to-supporting-answers
This article was also inspired by Duane Forrester’s excellent analysis:
- Microsoft Just Proved A Point About Search Today (Substack)
https://duaneforresterdecodes.substack.com/p/microsoft-just-proved-a-point-about - Microsoft Just Proved A Point About Search Today (Search Engine Journal)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/microsoft-just-proved-a-point-about-search-today/580664/
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