By Steve Merrill, Founder of WRKNG Digital | June 30, 2026
Microsoft Copilot is embedded in every Windows 11 device - that's 500 million+ users with an AI assistant one click away from making product recommendations. When someone asks Copilot "find me a good standing desk under $400," it doesn't guess. It pulls from specific data sources. If your Shopify store isn't feeding those sources, you don't exist. Here are the 8 signals that decide whether Copilot recommends your products.
1. Bing Shopping Index Inclusion
Copilot's shopping recommendations draw from the Bing Shopping index, which is fed by Microsoft Merchant Center - not Google Merchant Center. Those are two separate product feeds. Most Shopify stores have spent years optimizing their Google Shopping feed and never submitted a single product to Bing. That's a full gap in Copilot coverage. Submit your product feed at ads.microsoft.com and verify it's actively syncing.
2. Product Page Schema Richness
When a user asks Copilot for a product recommendation, it reads product pages directly - not just the feed. Your Product schema needs to include type, brand, specific attributes (size, color, material), current price, and availability. Incomplete schema means Copilot either skips your page or pulls partial information that makes your product look generic. Per Microsoft's structured data documentation, rich product markup directly affects how Bing's crawler categorizes and surfaces your products in AI-generated responses.
3. Bing Webmaster Tools Verification
Verifying your Shopify store in Bing Webmaster Tools puts your site in Microsoft's priority crawl queue. Unverified stores wait in the general queue - which updates far less frequently than Google's. Product pages that change pricing or availability weekly may show outdated data to Copilot for weeks at a time. Verification takes about 10 minutes. It's a free fix with direct impact on how current your product data looks to Copilot.
4. Shop Pay x Microsoft Payments Integration
Microsoft is building payment partnerships for agentic checkout - the ability for Copilot to complete a purchase on a user's behalf without leaving the conversation. Stores running Shop Pay with clean, low-friction checkout flows are positioned early for this integration. It's not live everywhere in 2026. But Microsoft has confirmed the agentic commerce direction, and Shopify's partnership with Microsoft means Shop Pay-enabled stores are in the integration path. Clean checkout infrastructure now means less friction when this goes wide.
5. Bing Places for Business (Physical Locations)
If your Shopify store has physical retail, a complete Bing Places for Business listing improves how Copilot handles "local shopping" queries. "Where can I buy X near me?" is an increasingly common Copilot prompt pattern. Without a verified Bing Places listing, Copilot has no local anchor for your brand. Claiming and verifying takes about 20 minutes. Hours, address, phone, website - fill every field.
6. Product Review Data in Bing's Index
Copilot shopping results favor products with visible review scores. If your reviews app doesn't push review data into your Bing Merchant Center product feed, Copilot won't show your ratings - even if you have 500 five-star reviews on your Shopify store. Check whether your review platform (Judge.me, Okendo, Yotpo) has a Bing feed integration. If not, you may need to manually append aggregateRating to your product schema to make review data visible to Bing's crawlers.
7. Price History Data
Bing tracks price history for products across the web. Copilot uses this data when making purchase recommendations - products with stable or declining price histories get recommended more confidently. Frequent price spikes (flash sales followed by rapid reversals, or inconsistent promotional pricing) reduce Copilot's confidence in recommending your product at the current price. If your pricing strategy involves regular discount cycles, consider whether the volatility is eroding your Copilot recommendation rate more than the short-term revenue gains are worth.
8. Brand Bing Knowledge Card
A complete Bing Knowledge Card - name, logo, social profiles, website, founding date - tells Copilot that your brand is a verified entity, not just a collection of product pages. Without entity recognition, Copilot treats your brand as an unknown. With it, brand-level queries ("Is [your brand] good quality?") return grounded answers instead of deflections. Claim your brand's Bing entity profile through your verified Bing Webmaster Tools account, or through the Bing Entity Search API. Keep your social profiles current - Bing pulls from LinkedIn, Instagram, and X to build the card.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does optimizing for Bing also cover Microsoft Copilot?
Yes - with nuance. Copilot pulls from Bing's index, Bing Merchant Center, and Microsoft's own entity graph. Bing SEO helps, but a standalone Bing strategy misses the Merchant Center feed, which is where product-specific shopping recommendations actually originate. You need both.
Q: My Google Shopping feed is live. Do I need a separate Bing Merchant Center feed?
Yes. Microsoft Merchant Center is a completely separate platform at ads.microsoft.com. Google product feeds don't automatically sync to Bing. Most feed management apps (DataFeedWatch, Feedonomics, GoDataFeed) support Bing as a separate channel - it usually takes less than an hour to set up once your Google feed is already structured correctly.
Q: How often does Bing crawl Shopify stores?
Without Bing Webmaster Tools verification, Bing's general crawl queue updates product pages every few weeks. Verified sites with active sitemaps submitted through Webmaster Tools can expect crawls within days of major content changes. For stores with frequent inventory or pricing changes, that gap matters.
Q: Is Copilot shopping replacing Bing Shopping ads?
Not replacing - expanding. Microsoft is building Copilot as an AI layer on top of Bing's existing infrastructure. Bing Shopping ads still run. Copilot organic recommendations are a separate channel that draws from the same Merchant Center data. Being in the Merchant Center feed helps both.
Q: How do I know if Copilot is already recommending my store?
Test it directly. Open Copilot and ask product queries in your category - "best [your product type] under $X," "where to buy [specific product]," "compare [product type] options." If your brand doesn't appear in 10+ category-level queries, you have a visibility gap in at least one of these 8 signals.
Run your store through an AI shopping audit to see exactly which of these signals are missing. See how your store scores for Microsoft Copilot visibility
