Copilot surfaces products through Bing, so your indexing, product feeds, and structured data decide whether it recommends you. Make product pages crawlable, mark them up with product and review schema, keep your Merchant feed clean, and earn third-party mentions. Copilot names brands it can read clearly and corroborate.
How Copilot finds products
Copilot runs on Bing, so Bing's index and shopping data are your battleground. When a shopper asks Copilot for a recommendation, it pulls from what Bing has crawled, the structured product data it can read, and third-party sources that corroborate quality. If Bing cannot see your catalog cleanly, Copilot cannot recommend it. This is a different pipeline from Google, and ecommerce brands who only optimize for Google often leave Copilot entirely untended.
Bing indexing comes first
Nothing else matters if Bing has not indexed you well. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and confirm your product pages are actually crawled and rendered. Many stores are strong in Google and nearly invisible in Bing simply because no one checked. The broader groundwork for online stores is covered in AI visibility for ecommerce brands, and Bing coverage is step one of it.
Feeds and Merchant data
Shopping engines run on feeds. A clean, complete product feed in Microsoft Merchant Center gives Copilot accurate titles, prices, availability, and images to work from. Keep it tight:
- Accurate, descriptive product titles.
- Current pricing and stock status.
- High-quality images and complete attributes.
- No disapprovals sitting unresolved.
A stale or partial feed means Copilot works from bad data, or skips you for a competitor whose feed is complete. Treat the feed as a living asset and check it on a regular schedule, because catalogs drift and a feed that was clean last quarter rarely stays that way on its own.
Structured data on product pages
Schema is how you hand Copilot the facts directly. Product, offer, and review markup let it read price, availability, and rating without guessing. This is the core of optimizing product pages for AI recommendations: make every important attribute machine-readable and stated in plain text on the page, not locked in an image or a script.
Add genuine specifications, materials, sizing, and use cases. The more concrete, quotable detail a page carries, the more reasons Copilot has to name it.
Corroboration and reviews
Copilot, like other engines, trusts products that others vouch for. Independent reviews, roundups, and reputable retailer listings all corroborate that your product is real and good. The Princeton-led GEO study found that adding cited sources, statistics, and quotations can meaningfully raise how often a page is surfaced in AI answers. For ecommerce, that translates to real specs, genuine review content, and third-party mentions working together to make you the safe recommendation.
The ecommerce priority order
Sequence your effort:
- Verify and index your store in Bing.
- Fix your Microsoft Merchant feed.
- Add product, offer, and review schema.
- Deepen product page detail with real specs.
- Earn independent reviews and roundup mentions.
General AEO craft applies too, which is why how to get cited by Microsoft Copilot is worth pairing with this. Copilot never guarantees a slot, but a clean feed plus rich, corroborated pages is how you become the likely pick.
Why Bing is easy to overlook
Most ecommerce teams pour everything into Google and quietly ignore Bing, which is exactly why Copilot is winnable. Because Copilot runs on Bing, a store that is invisible there is invisible to Copilot, no matter how strong its Google presence. The upside is that the competition for Bing attention is often thinner, so basic hygiene goes a long way. Verifying your store, submitting a sitemap, and confirming your product pages are crawled is unglamorous work that many competitors simply never do. That neglect is your opening. The brands that treat Bing as a real channel, not an afterthought, tend to show up in Copilot recommendations their better-known rivals miss.
Product content depth
Thin product pages are the most common reason a good product goes unrecommended. Copilot needs concrete, quotable facts to justify naming you, and a page with two lines of marketing copy gives it nothing to work with. Real depth means genuine specifications, materials, dimensions, use cases, care instructions, and honest answers to the questions buyers actually ask. Every concrete detail is another reason for the engine to surface you and another fact it can quote with confidence. This depth also helps human shoppers convert, so it pays twice. Never pad it with invented specs, though — accuracy is what keeps you trusted across both the engine and the customer.
Questions people ask
Bing. Copilot is Microsoft's assistant and draws on Bing's index and shopping data, not Google's. That means ecommerce brands optimized only for Google can be nearly invisible in Copilot. Start by verifying your store in Bing Webmaster Tools, submitting your sitemap, and confirming your product pages are crawled and rendered before doing anything more advanced.
It helps significantly. A clean, complete feed in Microsoft Merchant Center gives Copilot accurate titles, prices, availability, and images to recommend from. Keep titles descriptive, pricing and stock current, images high quality, and resolve any disapprovals. A stale or partial feed means Copilot works from bad data or skips you for a competitor whose feed is complete.
Product, offer, and review schema at minimum. These let Copilot read price, availability, and rating directly instead of guessing. Pair the markup with plain-text specs on the page — materials, sizing, use cases — since important facts should never be locked inside images or scripts. Concrete, machine-readable detail gives Copilot more reasons to name your product.
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