What is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is the umbrella brand for Microsoft's AI assistant family — spanning Microsoft 365 Copilot (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams), Copilot in Windows, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio (custom agents), Bing Copilot (web search and chat), and Copilot in Microsoft Edge. Under the hood, most surfaces run on OpenAI GPT models (GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-5 in 2025) with retrieval-augmented grounding over Microsoft Graph and live web search. For SEO and content marketing, Bing Copilot is the relevant surface: it now answers a meaningful share of queries with cited AI-generated answers similar to Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. Bing Copilot citations carry brand-recall and referral value, and instrumenting citation share in Copilot is a standard part of mature GEO programs alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI surfaces.