Bing Topics Portfolio: A Practical AI Visibility Guide for Small Businesses

Bing’s new Topics Portfolio report can help you plan content around the questions where your website already has some AI visibility. For a small business, the useful question is whether those topics connect to the customers and services you actually want—not how many loosely related queries you can target.

Microsoft announced Topics Portfolio on 13 October 2026. This guide, published on 27 October, explains the update and suggests a practical way to use it. It is not a claim that every business will have access or that using the report guarantees citations.

What changed in Bing Webmaster Tools?

Topics Portfolio is a beta view inside AI Performance. It groups grounding queries into broader themes and includes opportunity queries where other websites appear but yours does not. Microsoft describes the figures as approximate, with AI-generated classifications and limited visibility when there is insufficient activity.

That means a missing report or a short list needs context. A new website with limited search presence should first check whether its important pages can be discovered, crawled and indexed. Publishing unrelated articles to fill a report is unlikely to help a visitor deciding whether to hire you.

Citations, traffic and enquiries answer different questions

Bing’s AI Performance documentation describes citation activity, cited pages and sampled grounding queries. Those measures describe references to your content. They do not establish a page’s ranking, importance or commercial value.

Keep separate records for:

Measure	What it helps you understand	What it does not establish
Cited pages	Which pages AI answers reference	Whether someone clicked through
Referral visits	Whether visitors reached your website	Whether they were suitable customers
Qualified enquiries	Whether useful conversations started	Which single piece of content caused the whole journey

For example, an explanation of care-agency CRM requirements might help a family-care provider assess a system. The next step should lead to a relevant service page or a useful conversation. A large number of unrelated citations would be a weaker business result.

A practical review you can do in one sitting

The workflow below is Flowzync’s suggested approach, rather than a Microsoft ranking formula.

1. Choose one service you want to grow

Start with an actual commercial priority: WordPress redesigns, care-agency follow-up, or online bookings, for example. Write down the audience, the problem and the next step you want a reader to take.

If you cannot make that connection for a suggested topic, leave it alone. An opportunity in a tool is not automatically an opportunity for your business.

2. Check the page you already have

Before writing anything, open the service page as a prospective customer. Does it explain who it is for, what is included, what the process looks like and how to enquire? Does it work on a phone? Is there a useful example of the work?

A page that attracts research interest but leaves the buying questions unanswered needs a clearer explanation before it needs more supporting articles. Our website design service starts with that customer journey.

3. Group useful questions by the decision they support

Suppose your priority is a WordPress redesign. Questions about preserving existing rankings, editing content and choosing the right platform belong to the same buying journey. They can support one strong service page through a small set of focused guides.

Questions about a competitor’s brand, an unrelated market or a service you do not provide may be unsuitable even when a report shows activity. Assess relevance manually.

4. Improve the best existing answer first

Add the explanation readers are missing. A real process example, a clear comparison or a checklist based on how you deliver the service can be more useful than another generic introduction.

Keep the page’s established URL when its purpose remains the same. Connect it to relevant services and related reading. Our website migration guide explains why changing URLs without planning can create avoidable search problems.

5. Record a small number of changes

A simple change log is enough: the page, what improved, the date and the business question it now answers. This helps you interpret later movements without attributing every fluctuation to your latest edit.

Review citations, visits and enquiries over a sensible period. Small samples can move sharply; one week is rarely a useful basis for a major redesign decision.

Technical SEO still comes first

Google’s guidance for AI features says a supporting page must be indexed and eligible for a search snippet. It does not require special AI schema or a new machine-readable file. Its recommendations include normal crawl access, useful internal links and structured data that matches the visible page.

In practice, check that important URLs return a successful response, identify the intended canonical page, appear in a maintained sitemap and have genuine internal links. A discovery notification or sitemap submission does not guarantee indexing.

If your pages are still waiting to be crawled, this new-website SEO guide is a better starting point than buying an “AI visibility” package with guaranteed results.

What to do if the report is empty

Continue with the customer questions you can verify through real enquiries and your existing service work. Check the technical foundations, make the most useful pages easy to reach, and publish only when you have something specific to add.

For help connecting those foundations, explore our SEO services or tell us about your website. The aim is a useful, understandable site that supports real customer decisions. A report can help you investigate progress; it cannot replace that work.

Sources and scope

• Microsoft Bing: Topics Portfolio beta announcement, 13 October 2026.
• Microsoft Bing: AI Performance report overview, 10 February 2026.
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website, reviewed for this article on 27 October 2026.

Product availability and report labels may change. The practical workflow above is editorial guidance, not a promise of search or AI placement.