Bing, Microsoft Copilot and IndexNow - the Forgotten Ecosystem Feeding AI Answers
On July 1, 2026, Fabrice Canel, Bing's longtime head of crawling and indexing and the chief architect of the IndexNow protocol, retired from Microsoft. It's a good moment to notice how much of today's AI-generated answers actually run on the infrastructure he built. The whole SEO world is debating Google AI Overviews, while Microsoft Copilot entirely, and ChatGPT substantially, pull sources from the Bing index - and since February 2026, Bing itself shows you when you're being cited. Here's how the ecosystem works, how to configure it, and how much traffic it actually delivers.