Partly, and less than you would expect. Copilot is grounded in the Bing index, and Bing ranks differently from Google, so strong Google visibility does not reliably carry across. The good news is that the fix is cheap and most UK firms have never done it, which makes it unusually uncompetitive.

The short version

Why the gap exists

UK search marketing has concentrated on Google for sound commercial reasons: it holds the overwhelming majority of UK search. The by-product is that Bing has been treated as a rounding error for a decade, and nobody noticed when it stopped being one.

Copilot is grounded in Microsoft’s index. If Bing has not indexed your page, or ranks it poorly, Copilot will not surface it, regardless of how well you perform in Google.

The overlap is real but partial. Both crawl the open web and both reward relevance and authority. But they are separate indexes with separate coverage and separate ranking behaviour. Bing’s index is smaller, so pages Google holds may simply be absent. Bing has historically weighted exact relevance and on-page signals somewhat differently, and it responds to its own webmaster tooling in ways Google does not.

The practical result is a distribution rather than a rule: some sites perform comparably across both, and some rank on page one in Google and are effectively absent from Bing. You cannot know which you are without looking, and almost nobody looks.

There is a second payoff. OpenAI’s retrieval has historically leaned on Bing, so Bing presence has been a sensible hedge for ChatGPT visibility as well. That relationship has evolved and OpenAI increasingly runs its own retrieval, but Bing coverage remains cheap insurance across more than one assistant.

How to check it yourself

Ten minutes, and most firms have never done any of it:

  1. Search your five most important terms in Bing. Not Google. Compare honestly.
  2. Run site:yourdomain.com in Bing and compare the count against the same query in Google. A large gap means an indexing problem, not a ranking one.
  3. Check whether anyone has ever claimed Bing Webmaster Tools for your domain. If nobody knows, the answer is no.
  4. Ask Copilot your category question and see who it names.
  5. Check robots.txt for Bingbot and confirm no firewall rule is blocking it.

What to do about it

  1. Claim Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Free, takes an afternoon, and you can import settings directly from Google Search Console rather than starting again.
  2. Work the Bing crawl report. It surfaces issues Google’s tooling does not, and fixing them often helps both.
  3. Use IndexNow. Bing supports it and it gets new and updated pages picked up quickly. It is one of the few genuine accelerants available anywhere in this field.
  4. Track Bing visibility separately. Reporting only Google performance will hide this gap indefinitely.
  5. Treat it as the cheapest win available. Low effort, low competition, and it improves your position on more than one assistant at once.

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