Published Oct 12, 2026 · 4 min read · By Sam Adebayo

Copilot cited one of our blog posts 9,757 times in three months. Here's what that was worth

I run Eodly, a small tool that sends founders one report each evening about what their team got done. In June we published a plain how-to post, How to write an end-of-day report, with a template people can copy. It was one of six SEO posts we wrote that month and I didn't think about it again.

Then Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report, and that one post turned out to be the most cited thing we have ever published. These are the numbers, straight from Bing and from our own analytics, for 12 July to 10 October 2026.

The numbers

Bing's report covers "Microsoft Copilots and Partners". Over those three months it counted 9,757 citations of eodly.io. Almost all of them, about 9,700, were that single post. Six other pages shared the rest, with single-digit counts.

The questions people asked when Copilot cited us, as Bing labels them:

Bing calls the query table a sample, so treat the shares as rough. What they say is that for the plain question "what is an end-of-day report and how do I write one", Copilot was pulling from our page in somewhere between one answer in seven and one in three.

Now the other side of the ledger. Over the same three months:

• Bing search sent that post 7 clicks from 1,200 impressions, at an average position of 7.2.
• Our analytics recorded 11 visits to the post in total: 5 from Bing, 4 direct, 1 from Yahoo, 1 from another page on our site.
• Not one visit came from copilot.microsoft.com or any other Copilot surface.

Our analytics can undercount, since some people block it. But the gap here is not a rounding error. Nearly ten thousand citations turned into zero recorded visits.

Why it makes sense once you look at the queries

Every query in that table is informational. Someone wants the format of a report, Copilot gives them the format, and they are done. There is nothing left to click for. The answer is the product, and the page that supplied it is a footnote.

It also matters who is asking. People who search "eod report format" are mostly the ones writing the report: an employee whose manager asked for one. They are not the people who would ever pay for a tool that collects reports from a whole team. So even a perfect click-through rate on this traffic would have been the wrong audience for us.

What we changed

In late September, once we saw the citations, we made three changes to the post:

1. We put Eodly's name on the template itself, so an answer quoting it carries the name with it.
2. We added a link halfway down to a free version that builds the report as you type, for anyone who does want to click.
3. We wrote a separate page for the people who would actually buy, an end-of-day report template for teams, aimed at the manager rather than the person filling it in.

Citations kept climbing after those edits. The best week was 20 to 26 September, with 2,572 citations, and the best single day was 25 September, with 550. Visits did not move.

Then it stopped, and I don't know why

From 30 September the citations fell off a cliff: 142 that day, 13 the next, mostly double digits after that, and zero on 10 October. Bing's most recent days can fill in late, but the drop started well before that window.

The post itself was not edited after 21 September. Our robots.txt allows every search and AI crawler, and still does. The site had a copy rewrite on 1 October, but the fall began the day before it went out. I don't have an explanation yet, and I would rather say that than invent one. If you have seen the same pattern in your own Bing data, I would like to hear about it.

What I take from it

AI citations are real, measurable, and so far worth very little in visits for informational content. I would still write the post again, because being the source an assistant quotes is not nothing, and putting your name inside the quoted part is cheap. But I no longer count citations as traffic, and I no longer read a flat analytics chart as a sign that nobody is reading.

If your traffic looks flat, open the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools. You may be read far more than you are visited, by people who will never know your site exists.

The data: Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance (citations) and Search Performance (clicks, impressions), 3-month view ending 10 October 2026, plus page views from our own analytics for the same period.