Microsoft Introduces Topics Portfolio in Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft announced a new beta report update to the AI performance reporting within Bing Webmaster Tools named Topics Portfolio. Topics Portfolio groups the grounding queries where your site appears into broader thematic clusters.
“Topics Portfolio adds the broader view – how that presence is distributed across themes, how much demand each theme represents, how competitive each theme is and where your site has room to grow,” Microsoft wrote.
What it looks like.
Here is a sample screenshot Microsoft shared of this new Topics Portfolio report:
What it all means.
This gives you a different view of the AI Performance reports in Bing Webmaster Tools. This report shows you a “personalized list of the topics where your site has a meaningful presence, with three ecosystem measures beside each one.”
Here is what each section means:
- Topic: A broad thematic cluster of related grounding queries where your site appears.
- Topic Size: The approximate total citations across all sites for this topic over the selected period – a measure of how much AI Search demand the topic represents.
- Sites Cited: The approximate number of sites appearing for queries in this topic, which indicates how crowded the topic is.
- Queries: The approximate number of distinct grounding queries in this topic.
Then as you scroll, you will see a “Top Opportunity Queries” section that shows “the strongest queries across your whole portfolio where other sites appear and yours does not. It is a fast, cross-topic read on where you could grow. Citation volumes there are shown as ranges rather than exact numbers,” Microsoft explained.
Here is a screenshot of that:
Then you can drill down into a topic to see more detail including Topic Size, the citations within the topic, and the number of queries in it – and beneath them the queries themselves are split into two tables.
How to access this new report.
Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools and click on the AI Performance tab. A new Topics Portfolio tab should be next to Citations & Pages; if it is not, then there is not enough data to show you this report.
Why we care.
Microsoft posted a number of reasons why we should care about this new report, but being that we are not given click data, I guess anything we are given about our visibility in AI Search is important.
Microsoft wrote:
- Topic classification is AI-generated and can occasionally be imperfect, so a query may land in a topic you would have labelled differently.
- Topics with insufficient site presence or insufficient ecosystem activity are not shown, so smaller sites may see a shorter list or may not even see this feature.
- Branded queries can appear as opportunity queries. In a Running Shoes topic, for instance, contososhoes.com may see Air Shoes listed as an opportunity even though it is a Compete-branded query.
- Topic Size, Sites Cited and Queries are approximate, and opportunity citation volumes are deliberately shown as ranges.