Do Google AI answers and Copilot cite the same sites?
Copilot cited our mine-safety site 6,253 times in four weeks. Google's AI showed it 3 times. The search index under each AI decides.
No. On our sites the gap is huge. We run eight sites that report to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and both tools now count how often their AI answers point to a site. In the four weeks from September 28, 2026, Microsoft Copilot cited our Mining Incidents site 6,253 times. The site tracks US mine deaths from MSHA records. Google showed a link to it inside an AI answer 3 times.
Same site, same pages, same four weeks. The difference is not the AI. It is the search index under it.
Each AI cites what its own search engine already shows
In ordinary search over the same weeks, Google showed Mining Incidents pages 159 times. Bing showed them 4,676 times. Google's indexing report for the site, as of October 27, lists 44,547 pages that Google has found but not indexed.
Google's AI answers draw on Google's index. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing's. A page that Google has not indexed is a page that Google's AI does not cite.
Our other sites follow the same rule. Where Bing carries more of a site's search traffic, Copilot carries more of its AI citations. Where Google carries the search traffic, Google's AI takes a bigger share.
The order holds from top to bottom. The Vault Report gets 88% of its search impressions from Google, and Google's AI showed it 12,199 times. Mining Incidents gets 3% from Google, and Google's AI showed it 3 times.
Copilot also cites far more readily
The light bar is longer than the dark bar on every row. Copilot takes a bigger share of the AI appearances than Bing takes of plain search, on all eight sites.
| Engine | Ordinary search impressions | AI answer appearances |
|---|---|---|
| 159,739 | 12,329 | |
| Bing and Copilot | 30,531 | 22,230 |
Across the eight sites, Google's AI showed a link about once for every 13 ordinary search impressions. Copilot cited a page about three times for every four. The two tools do not count the same thing, so read that ratio loosely. Google counts a link shown in an AI answer. Bing counts a citation by Copilot and its partners. But the direction was the same on all eight sites.
What people ask Copilot that lands on us
The top Copilot query for Mining Incidents was "msha fatality alerts 2026", with 189 citations. Next came "msha fatals" with 170 and "msha fatalgrams" with 84. The most cited page was our list of MSHA fatality alerts, with 857 citations. These are people who want the newest mine deaths. Copilot sends them to us. Google's AI almost never does, because Google has not put the pages in its index.
Why Google holds back, as best we can tell
Mining Incidents is a young site with tens of thousands of record pages, one for each mine, accident and citation. Google has found most of them and indexed few. Our best guess is that Google is waiting for evidence that the pages deserve a place in the index, most likely links from other sites. Bing indexed them without that wait. Until Google indexes the pages, its AI will keep sending these readers somewhere else.
If you want to know whether AI answers can find your site, look at the search engine under each AI first. A site that Google search does not show, Google's AI does not cite. And Copilot may already cite you far more often than you think.
How we counted
All numbers come from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for eight sites we run, read by our own harvesters. Google figures cover September 28 to October 24, 2026 (Google's newest day at the time). Google AI appearances are the daily totals from Search Console's generative AI report. Copilot citations are Bing's AI Performance total by page for its 28-day window, September 28 to October 26. Ordinary search impressions are summed per page from each tool's page report. "Three newer sites" are hudscores.com, selfpayprices.com and legitmover.com, grouped because each is small. The count of pages Google has found but not indexed is the sum of the "Discovered" and "Crawled, currently not indexed" rows in Google's page indexing report for miningincidents.org on October 27.