How to Get Found in Microsoft Copilot

Copilot’s roots are Bing, not Google

It’s easy to lump Copilot in with ChatGPT and Gemini and assume the same rules apply everywhere, but Copilot leans heavily on Microsoft’s own Bing search infrastructure, and that’s a detail most small businesses have never thought about because they’ve never bothered with Bing at all. If your only local listing effort has gone into Google Business Profile, and you’ve never touched Bing Places for Business, you’ve built visibility for exactly the platforms that don’t include Copilot. That’s not a huge extra job, Bing Places is Microsoft’s direct equivalent of Google’s profile system, and it takes roughly the same information you’ve already gathered for Google. But skipping it means Copilot is working from a much thinner picture of your business than Google’s own tools would be, even if your Google presence is excellent. Treat Bing as its own small, separate task rather than assuming Google effort automatically covers it, because for Copilot specifically, it doesn’t.

The captive audience most businesses forget about

Here’s what makes Copilot worth the effort even though fewer people in the UK deliberately choose Bing.com over Google for everyday searching. Copilot isn’t just a website you have to remember to visit, it’s built directly into Windows, into Edge, and into Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Outlook that huge numbers of office workers use every single day without thinking about it. That means someone drafting an email in Outlook, or researching a supplier while writing a document in Word, might hit Copilot mid-task without ever having ‘gone looking for an AI tool’ the way they would with ChatGPT. For a business that sells to other businesses in particular, that’s a meaningful, different kind of exposure, people encountering you inside their actual workflow, not during a dedicated search session. It’s a quieter channel than the others, but for B2B especially, it’s not one worth ignoring.

What actually improves your odds in Copilot

Start with Bing Places for Business and fill it in properly, the same care you’d give Google Business Profile, accurate category, hours, service area, photos. Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and check nothing on your site is accidentally blocking Bing’s crawler, it happens more often than you’d think, usually through an old robots.txt rule nobody remembered was there. Keep your core pages clear and factual, the same plain-English, specific-answer approach that helps everywhere else in this whole picture. And don’t ignore LinkedIn. Microsoft owns it, and a properly filled-out Company Page with real activity on it feeds into the broader Microsoft ecosystem in ways a dormant profile never will. None of this is glamorous work, it’s admin, but it’s admin almost nobody in your industry has bothered doing, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.

The mistake almost every small business makes here

Nearly every small business we look at has put real effort into Google Business Profile and precisely zero effort into Bing Places, usually because someone, at some point, decided Bing wasn’t worth bothering with since so few people search Bing.com directly in the UK. That logic made sense five years ago. It doesn’t hold up now that Copilot has folded Bing’s infrastructure into Windows and Microsoft 365 for hundreds of millions of users who aren’t consciously ‘using Bing’ at all, they’re just using their laptop. The fix takes maybe forty minutes, claim your Bing Places listing, fill it in with the same details you’ve already got for Google, and you’ve closed a gap most of your local competitors haven’t even noticed exists yet.