Microsoft's own data puts Bing Chat click rates far below search
Summary
First-party click data from a search provider has entered the public record, and it separates chat answers from web results. No platform report gives a site owner that same cut.
Treat assistant surfaces as their own channel measured from referrer data, and read Bing's citation metrics and Search Console's AI impressions as visibility only, never as clicks.
News publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft filed a combined summary judgment brief on Sept. 17 in federal court in New York, and it cites Microsoft’s own click data for the plaintiffs’ sites. Per Search Engine Journal’s report on the brief, click-through rate in Bing Chat ran well below Bing Web Search for all three plaintiff groups.
| Plaintiff group | CTR in Bing Chat against Bing Web Search |
|---|---|
| The New York Times’ sites | 87% to 93% lower |
| Daily News sites | 83% to 91% lower |
| Ziff Davis sites | 51% to 94% lower |
The brief defines CTR as clicks to a URL relative to its impressions, counting an impression as that URL appearing either in a search results page or in a chatbot’s response. So the ranges describe what happens after a link is shown, not how many visits any site lost.
Estimates of the click gap between AI answers and search results have until now come from outside sampling, including Ahrefs’ measurement of a 23% CTR drop for France’s most exposed sites. The figures in the brief come from the company that served both surfaces and counted both sets of impressions.
No report available to a site owner makes that same cut. Microsoft’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations, and its help page says citation metrics differ from the traditional metrics that measure rankings, clicks and traffic. Citation Share, which Microsoft added in June, does not represent traffic share. Google’s generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions and lists no clicks. Bing’s own Performance report has folded chat clicks and impressions in with web clicks and impressions since Microsoft added chat data in 2023, so a CTR decline there cannot be pinned on the chat surface.
The conclusion to draw is that a citation count is not a traffic forecast, and that the only click data a site owner can see is its own. Chat and assistant traffic arrives with its own referrers and belongs in its own channel with its own baseline, not inside a combined AI bucket assembled from vendor visibility scores. Third-party tools do not close the gap, because their scores disagree with each other and have no true value to check against.
The ranges are still not a planning number. The passage gives no date range, no count of the queries, impressions or clicks involved, no account of how the sites or periods were selected, and no explanation of what the low and high ends of each range stand for. Microsoft renamed Bing Chat to Copilot in November 2023, and nothing in the brief ties the figures to the current product.
It is also one side’s argument in a case the court has not ruled on. OpenAI and Microsoft filed their own summary judgment motions on Sept. 4 arguing fair use, and a Microsoft spokesperson said the company’s filings explain why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism. The brief’s headline quotes are internal messages chosen by the opposing party: an OpenAI engineer wrote in February 2023 that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click,” and Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, said there was “no good reason to click” a source link once ChatGPT had answered. The CTR figures are measured data, even with the method undisclosed; the quotes are selected lines.
These numbers also describe only the answer surface, so they say nothing about training crawlers such as GPTBot, and nothing about agents that navigate a site on a user’s behalf.
What to do
- Split chat and assistant referrals out of your analytics into a channel of their own, with their own session baseline, so a change in that surface does not disappear into organic search totals.
- Report Bing’s Citation Share and Search Console’s AI impressions as visibility figures. Neither carries a click number, so neither can support a traffic projection.
- Do not set targets or model revenue against the brief’s ranges. They cover three news publishers over an undisclosed period on a product that has since been renamed.
- Watch the Oct. 23 oppositions, which Judge Sidney H. Stein’s Sept. 24 order scheduled ahead of Nov. 20 replies, for whether Microsoft says how it measured this CTR. A stated method is what would turn the figures into something a practitioner could compare against.