What content should Business Central partners publish to rank for AI and Copilot searches?

When a finance director starts looking at a new ERP system, or starts wondering whether the one they've got is still keeping up, the way they go about it has changed quite a bit. A few years ago they'd have typed a handful of keywords into Google and clicked through a page of partner websites, whereas now they're just as likely to ask Copilot, ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview a proper question, like "is Copilot included in Business Central?" or "should we upgrade from NAV to Business Central?", and read the answer before they visit a single website.

That matters a great deal if you're a Business Central partner, because those AI answers have to come from somewhere, and they're built from content that answers the question clearly. At the moment, surprisingly few partners are writing it.

So the question we wanted to answer was a simple one: what should you actually be publishing if you want to show up when your future customers ask about AI and Copilot in Business Central?

When we looked at UK search demand, the honest answer was that Copilot searches are still small, with "business central copilot", "copilot in business central" and "business central ai" each getting around 20 searches a month, and "how to enable copilot in business central" getting about 10.

Now, you might look at those numbers and decide it's not worth the effort, and that would be understandable. But every one of those terms has a keyword difficulty of 0 out of 100, which means almost nobody is competing for them, and "business central ai" also attracts advertisers paying around $9.50 a click. People don't tend to pay that for traffic that doesn't convert.

The bigger numbers sit elsewhere, with "business central partner" getting 260 searches a month, "nav to business central upgrade" getting 70 and "gp to business central migration" getting 30. That's where the buying intent is, so the smart move is to join your Copilot content up with your upgrade and partner content, rather than treating them as separate topics.

There's one more thing worth saying here. Questions about licensing, pricing, bank reconciliation and whether Copilot is included didn't return any data at all, but that doesn't mean nobody's asking. It means demand is unknown, and those are exactly the sorts of questions people tend to put to an AI assistant rather than type into a search bar.

Here are the nine types of content we'd recommend Business Central partners publish, in no particular order.

Pick the Copilot features your customers will actually use and give each one its own page, starting with bank reconciliation assist, sales line suggestions, marketing text suggestions, chat with Copilot and analysis assist, alongside newer agents such as the Payables Agent.

For each one, explain what it does, how to set it up and what it needs to work well, and keep it all in plain English. A finance director doesn't need to know how the model works, but they'll definitely want to know whether it'll take some of the pain out of month-end.

These are the questions people ask word for word, whether that's how to enable Copilot in Business Central, how Copilot in Business Central differs from Copilot in the wider Dynamics 365 family, or simply whether it's included.

Start each page with a short, direct answer in the first couple of sentences and then add the detail underneath. Microsoft's own FAQ, for example, confirms that Copilot is included with a Business Central licence at no extra cost, although it reserves the right to introduce fair-use policies, quotas or pricing later on, and that's a two-line answer an AI assistant can happily lift and credit to you.

There's no shortage of generic "Copilot saves time" content out there, but what's missing is content that shows what Copilot actually looks like inside a manufacturing business, a distributor or a professional services firm.

Take one process per industry and show the before and after, so how long order entry took before and how long it takes now. The numbers are what make it believable, and they give an AI assistant something specific to quote.

This is where a lot of partner case studies fall down, because they lead with the project ("we implemented Business Central for X") when the reader really wants to know the result.

Flip it around by leading with the hours saved at month-end or how much faster orders are entered, and then tell the story of how you got there. If the customer's happy to be named, even better.

Copilot is only as good as the data and setup underneath it, and that's a conversation partners are well placed to lead. A downloadable checklist covering data quality, permissions, roles and change management is genuinely useful to the reader, and it also opens a conversation with someone who's actively thinking about AI, which is exactly who you want to be talking to.

This is the highest-demand topic on the list, and it's where Copilot gives you a real reason to act, because Copilot is only available in Business Central online and not on-premises or in private cloud. For anyone still running NAV or GP, that's a compelling point.

Write about the upgrade journey by all means, but make AI part of the "why now", so you're giving people a reason to move as well as a list of steps.

Licensing is where buyers get nervous, and it changes often enough that out-of-date content does more harm than good. Keep a single, well-structured FAQ page, date it and review it regularly, because if you're the partner with the clearest and most current answer, you'll be the one AI assistants point to.

A two-minute video of Copilot suggesting sales lines or reconciling a bank statement does more than a thousand words of description, but AI assistants can't watch videos, so always publish the transcript alongside it. That way you get the human appeal of video and the searchability of text.

With 260 searches a month and a difficulty of just 12, this is the page most likely to bring in buyers, yet too many partner pages read like a list of credentials. Use it instead to show what you know about Copilot and AI, link out to your explainers and case studies, and make it obvious why someone would choose you over the next partner.

Writing the right content is only half the job, and the other half is making it easy for Google and AI assistants to understand and trust. For me, these are the things that make the biggest difference.

You don't need to publish all nine at once. If I was a Business Central partner, I'd start with the partner page and the upgrade content, because that's where the demand and buying intent sit, and then build out the Copilot explainers and FAQs around them so that everything links back.

The search volumes might look small today, but with almost no competition, the partners who get in early are likely to be the ones AI assistants learn to trust.