Today, we are excited to expand that foundation with four new capabilities available in preview globally within Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare.

The original AI Performance experience helped answer an important question: Where is my content being cited in AI-generated answers? These new capabilities build on that foundation by helping publishers better understand why their content is being surfaced, which broader subject areas they are gaining visibility in, how their presence evolves relative to other cited sources, and how citation patterns change over time. 

As AI-powered experiences continue to evolve, publishers increasingly need tools that go beyond traditional rankings and keyword analysis. AI-generated answers are dynamic, contextual, and often synthesized from many sources at once. Understanding visibility in these systems requires more than a single metric or surface-level citation count. With these expanded preview capabilities, Bing Webmaster Tools is expanding first-party reporting to provide deeper insight into the query context, thematic patterns, relative citation presence, and changes over time that shape how content appears in AI-powered experiences.

That is the goal behind these new capabilities. 

Understanding the Intent Behind Citations 

One of the biggest challenges publishers face today is understanding the context behind AI-generated citations. A query alone often tells only part of the story.

In AI-generated answers, grounding refers to the source material and web evidence the system uses to support and cite its response. For deeper understanding of grounding – refer to Elevating the Role of Grounding on the AI Web and our recent Microsoft WebIQ announcement. 

With the new Intents feature, grounding queries in the AI Performance Report are now classified into broader categories such as Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Learn and Solve, Research, Creation, Local, and more. This helps publishers move beyond simply seeing which queries triggered citations and begin understanding the broader query context our systems associate with those citation appearances. 

For example, an e-commerce publisher may discover strong visibility in comparison-oriented or shopping-focused AI experiences, while an educational publisher may find that their content is frequently surfaced in research or learning-oriented interactions. These insights can help publishers better align content structure and depth with the types of experiences where AI systems are surfacing their content. 

Seeing Visibility Through Topics Instead of Individual Queries 

We are also introducing Topics, which group related grounding queries into broader thematic clusters. AI systems reason across concepts and themes rather than isolated keywords. Topics help publishers understand visibility in the same thematic structure that modern AI systems use to organize information.

Instead of analyzing visibility one query at a time, publishers can now start understanding which larger subject areas are driving citation activity. Queries such as “solar panels,” “solar energy efficiency,” and “residential solar installation,” for example, may all map into a broader topic cluster like Solar Energy. 

This creates a more natural way to analyze AI visibility. Content teams and publishers often think in terms of themes, editorial areas, and audience interests rather than isolated keywords. Topics help bridge that gap by turning grounding query data into a more thematic view of AI engagement. 

These insights can help publishers identify emerging areas of authority, discover gaps in topical coverage, and better understand how AI systems semantically group related content.

Like Intents, Topics are powered by evolving AI/ML classification systems. During the preview phase, some labels may still be broad – especially for highly specialized or niche domains – but the system is already beginning to reveal meaningful thematic patterns. We expect quality and precision to continue improving as the models mature and learn from broader real-world usage. 

Introducing Citation Share 

The next new capability we are introducing today is Citation Share.

While total citation counts show how often your content appears in AI-generated answers, Citation Share shows how much of the citation space your site receives for a specific grounding query. It is calculated as the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for that same grounding query. This helps publishers understand not just whether they were cited, but how much visibility they received within the full set of cited sources for that query. 

This can provide a more directional view into how visibility is evolving over time. Publishers may begin to identify areas where their content has strong and growing representation in AI-generated experiences, as well as areas where visibility may be more fragmented across many sources. 

Importantly, Citation Share is designed as an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard. It does not expose competitor domains, represent traffic share, or assign quality scores to content. 

AI citation ecosystems are inherently dynamic. Citation patterns can shift due to changes in user behavior, evolving models, freshness signals, partner refresh cycles, and broader changes across the web itself.  

Compare Changes Over Time 

We are also introducing Compare, which allows publishers to overlay a previous time period directly onto the current reporting view. 

This makes it easier to visually understand how citation activity is changing over time and observe shifts that may correlate with content updates, seasonality, changing demand, or broader ecosystem changes. 

For example, publishers can compare the current 30-day period against the prior 30 days or select custom date ranges to better understand evolving citation trends. 

Compare is designed to help publishers observe changes over time. Citation activity can be influenced by many factors including evolving AI models, competing content, freshness signals, and shifts in user demand.

Increasing transparency 

These new capabilities are part of Microsoft’s ongoing effort to provide greater transparency into how content appears across AI-powered experiences. As AI answers become a larger part of how people discover information, publishers need more than raw citation counts – they need reporting that helps them understand the context, topics, relative presence, and changes over time behind those citations. 

That is what this work is designed to advance. Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare give publishers a more practical way to observe citation activity, identify visibility patterns, and make more informed decisions about their content strategy. They do not turn AI visibility into a single ranking or score, but they do give webmasters a richer set of signals for understanding how their content is being represented across evolving AI experiences. 

As the AI web continues to evolve, we will continue investing in new reporting capabilities, richer analytics, and better visibility tools for webmasters and content creators. These preview features are early steps in a broader effort to make AI visibility more understandable, actionable, and useful for the publisher ecosystem.

Availability and Providing Feedback 

Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare are now beginning to roll out in preview within Bing Webmaster Tools globally today. These capabilities are early preview innovations built on continuously advancing AI/ML systems and aggregated citation signals. As more data becomes available and more publishers engage with these experiences, we expect the quality, coverage, and precision of these capabilities to continue strengthening over time. 

We encourage publishers, content creators, GEOs, and site owners to explore these new capabilities. Additionally, we are now introducing a preview feature to provide us with your feedback within the AI Performance Dashboard context through an easy-to-use UI.

To learn more about the existing AI Performance experience, see: 

• Bing Webmaster Tools & How-to: AI Performance FAQs 
• Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools – Public Preview 
• The AI Performance Dashboard: Your View into Where Your Brand Appears Across the AI Web 

Krishna Madhavan, Meenaz Merchant, Saral Nigam, and Trishna Shah
Product Managers, Microsoft AI 

The systems that define the agentic era will be the ones that can retrieve fresh, authoritative evidence quickly, transform it into useful context, and do so within the latency and efficiency budgets that multi-step reasoning demands.

Model capability alone no longer determines whether an AI system is useful. What matters is how effectively the full system connects models to the world, including information created after models were trained, and information too vast to encode in model weights.

Web IQ is a search engine for AI systems. Where Bing was built to help people search the web, Web IQ is built to help AI agents find the right information, turn it into useful evidence, and use it inside reasoning. Unlike other APIs that layer on top of fragile infrastructure, Web IQ is a new kind of search system, one that delivers the right evidence with the speed, quality, and efficiency modern agents require.

It builds on years of learning from Bing, but it required a major ground-up re-architecture to meet the demands of agentic workloads.

Built on Bing, Re-Architected for the Agentic Era

Web IQ starts from the foundation Microsoft has been building for decades: the Bing global index and ecosystem. Grounding quality depends on the breadth, freshness, and trustworthiness of the world representation underneath it – something that is achieved by building on Bing’s expansive reach.

But the agentic era asks fundamentally different questions of the stack. Agents do not issue a single search and stop. They retrieve repeatedly, reason over evidence, adapt to new information, and operate inside tight latency budgets. Meeting those requirements could not be solved by tuning a single component. It required re-architecting the system from the ground up from indexing and retrieval to ranking, passage selection, and orchestration so every layer is aligned around the needs of inference-time grounding. That is the core idea behind Web IQ: preserve the strengths of Bing’s foundation while redesigning the grounding stack to serve as the execution fabric for AI agents.

At the base of this system is something that predates Web IQ by many years: the Bing global index and ecosystem.

Evolving beyond a large crawl, it is a continuously refined representation of the web, built over decades through a combination of infrastructure, partnership, and discipline. It reflects millions of decisions about what to include, how to rank it, how to ensure freshness, and how to maintain trust.

That discipline extends to how we participate in the open web itself. Web IQ inherits Bing’s long-standing commitment to the conventions and evolving standards of the internet ecosystem, including honoring robots exclusion protocols, publisher controls, and access preferences that govern how content can be discovered, accessed, and used. We are actively engaging with the broader ecosystem through the IETF and other industry forums to help evolve interoperable standards for the AI era. Our goal is to be a sincere and trusted participant in the open web — one that respects publisher choice and helps sustain a healthy ecosystem for content providers, advertisers, developers, and users alike.

The role of that foundation is often underestimated. Grounding systems cannot exceed the quality of the world they observe. If the index is incomplete, stale, or unreliable, no amount of modeling can compensate. Web IQ begins from the premise that grounding quality is anchored in the quality of the underlying corpus and that corpus must be global, fresh, honor publisher preferences by default, and continuously evolving.

On top of that foundation sits the model layer, where we made a different kind of decision.

Rather than building a large collection of specialized models, we focused on a small number of models that are world-class and tightly integrated into the system. These models serve distinct but coordinated roles: they analyze content, they represent it in embedding space, and they rank and select it for use inside inference.

One of the central components here is our best-in-class embedding model, which defines how information is projected into a space where semantic similarity becomes computationally tractable. That decision alone has far-reaching consequences; the quality of embeddings determines not just recall during retrieval, but the shape of the candidate space that every downstream component operates on. We have built it to be competitive at the top of public benchmarks, but its role inside Web IQ is more pragmatic: when we search, we search the right neighborhood of the information space.

The embedding model is one part of the system. Alongside it are models that are optimized for content understanding and ranking, trained not for isolated metrics but for how their outputs are used inside LLM-driven reasoning. That alignment, between model objectives and system objectives, is what allows the stack to behave coherently under load.

Beneath the model layer, the problem changes character.

Grounding is no longer about semantics alone. It becomes a distributed systems problem at scale and this is where a great deal of our earlier work becomes relevant, particularly with systems like DiskANN. DiskANN changed the practical limits of nearest neighbor search by making it possible to operate over large, disk-resident vector spaces without sacrificing latency, removing the need to trade recall for memory footprint.

In Web IQ, this work is extended into a broader retrieval fabric. Retrieval is executed across distributed partitions, routed globally, and tightly optimized to meet latency constraints. Networking, data placement, and execution paths are all part of the design space – and they matter, because grounding is not a one-time operation. It is executed repeatedly within agentic workflows and at that scale, even small inefficiencies compound.

What happens after retrieval is equally consequential. Web IQ does not just return documents; it returns passages and structured evidence objects. Models do not need documents, they need information and documents are often a poor proxy for that. By operating at the level of passages, we can concentrate useful signal while eliminating irrelevant context, producing a much higher ratio of information to tokens.

This is why we often summarize the system with a simple principle: fewer tokens in, better answers out, lower cost per call. Cost is only part of it. The deeper value is maintaining precision in reasoning under constrained contexts.

At the top of the stack sits the orchestration layer, where the system comes together.

Queries are interpreted, retrieval is fanned out, results are merged, filtered, and transformed into evidence. Modalities are combined, trade-offs are enforced, and the system adapts to the structure of the request. What makes this layer different from traditional systems is that it’s just not an outer API layer. It is part of the execution loop of an AI agent. Latency here is not just user-visible but structurally significant: determining whether a system can afford to take multiple reasoning steps or must compress everything into a single attempt. That constraint shapes everything above it.

Quality, Latency, Token Density, and the Right Operating Points

When grounding becomes part of an agent’s execution loop, the core challenge is no longer retrieval in isolation. The system has to operate at the right point across latency, grounding quality, and token efficiency, because those three factors together determine whether multi-step reasoning is practical in the real world.

Quality is the first dimension. A grounding system also has to return evidence that actually satisfies user intent: complete, fresh, authoritative, and useful for downstream reasoning. We measure that with GDSAT, or grounding satisfaction – a metric, that unlike traditional relevance scores, captures whether the grounding truly meets user intent across completeness, freshness, and authority. Across production query sets, Web IQ consistently achieves higher grounding satisfaction than alternative systems in comparable configurations, which matters because it translates directly into greater user trust and stronger downstream outcomes.

Source: 3K Global, Blind Queries sampled from prod, Config: 10 results, 10K chars per result (or equivalent).

Speed is also imperative. It determines whether an agent can afford multiple retrieval-and-reasoning steps or must collapse everything into a single attempt. Web IQ is designed for production-scale speed, operating at sub-165ms p95 latency and, in our internal comparisons, nearly 2.5× faster than the next best alternative from the previous cohort of competitors under similar conditions.

 
From VMs hosted in 5 DCs: West US2, North Central US, East US2, North Europe, South Korea. P95 numbers are averaged across DCs for the cohort of competitors. Unique queries were used for avoiding cache hits. Config: 10 results, 10K chars per result.

The third variable is token efficiency, which determines whether the system can scale economically. Every token sent to the model carries both a cost and a latency implication. By operating on passage-level evidence and maintaining high information density per token, Web IQ reduces how much context is required to achieve a given level of quality.

Source: 3K Query set (Global, Prod sampled). Web results: 10, 15, 20. #Chars: 3K, 5K, 10K, 20k per result (or equivalent).

The result is a system designed to move the frontier on all three dimensions at once: lower latency, higher grounding satisfaction, and fewer tokens per call.

Architecture and Design Principles

The architecture of Web IQ follows a few core principles.

• Grounding is a full-stack systems problem. Trustworthy outputs depend on aligning every layer, from corpus quality and retrieval to ranking and orchestration.
• Foundation matters. A global and fresh corpus is essential for trustworthy grounding, which is why the Bing foundation remains so important even as the system above it is re-architected.
• The right evidence unit is the passage or structured evidence object that maximizes information density while minimizing token cost.
• Real operating points define the system. Latency, quality, and token constraints determine whether agents work reliably in practice, and the architecture is engineered around them.

The agentic web will be built by systems that can reason against the world as it actually is: fresh, contested, and constantly changing. That requires more than a model with a search tool attached. It requires a grounding layer engineered for the speed, quality, and economics of inference-time retrieval, built on a foundation the open web can trust.

That is what Web IQ is built to be, and where we believe the next decade of AI infrastructure is heading.

Find out more information about Web IQ, including how to express interest, here.

A deeper technical description of how we built Web IQ can be found in our Command Line blog here.

Knut Risvik
Distinguished Engineer, Search & AI

Today, we’re introducing an evolution of Bing Image Search– a unique AI-guided experience that organizes results to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed, making it easier to find what you’re looking for.

Behind the scenes, AI helps make this possible by automatically labeling and organizing images into clear categories and generating short summaries that explain each group. This added context helps you quickly understand what you’re seeing and decide where to explore next, reducing the need for extra searching or guesswork.

See the difference: from image overload to guided discovery

Curious how this new experience compares to traditional image search? The difference is clear the moment you see it side by side.

In the default image search experience, results appear as a dense grid filled with lots of images, minimal context, and little guidance on where to start or what to explore next. While there’s plenty to look at, it can be hard to understand how images relate to one another or how to make progress beyond scrolling.

With the new Bing Image Search experience, that changes once you opt in by clicking on “New Version” on the top right of the Images section.

Below is the current default experience showing the results for if you search for “Highest Mountains in Washington” and where you can opt in to the new experience by clicking on “New Version”:

Once opted-in, instead of a flat wall of image results, you’ll see a more structured experience that guides you to what’s next. At the top, two rows of highly relevant images give you a quick overview of your results. Below, images are grouped into clear, labeled sections with short summaries that explain what each group represents. This makes it easier to understand your results, compare ideas, and decide where to explore next. You’ll also see sources alongside these overviews, helping you feel more confident about where the information comes from.

Below is the same search for “Highest Mountains in Washington,” this time showing the new image search experience once opted in.

Whether you’re browsing ideas for a home refresh, researching a travel destination, or diving into a visual topic you’re curious about, this new experience is designed to help you move from browsing to deciding with less effort.

Ready to see it in action? Try it out now and opt in with the "New Version" toggle.

Built with intelligence—used with intention

At the heart of this evolution is a smarter image search experience that turns visual discovery into something more guided, useful, and intuitive. The goal isn’t to add noise and clutter; it’s to reduce it and help you get the information you need in a better, faster way.

The result is an image search experience on Bing that feels:

• More organized, so it’s easier to compare and explore
• More intuitive, so next steps feel obvious
• More helpful, especially for visual, idea-driven tasks

It’s intelligence you can feel and see, without needing to think about how it works.

Designed for the moments where images matter most

This new experience really shines in highly visual scenarios like design inspiration, shopping, education, and creative exploration. These are moments where images aren’t just nice to have; they’re essential to understanding options and making confident choices or getting inspired.

For example, if you’re curious about Picasso and his art, you can search “Picasso” in Bing and go to Images to see his work thoughtfully organized by style and period. Instead of a jumble of results, you’ll find clear categories that highlight different phases of his career, making it easier to explore how his artistry evolved over time.

Try it out today

Image Search is available today for Bing users in the United States on desktop, with no sign‑in required, and we’ll continue rolling it out to mobile and additional markets soon. You can opt in to this experience by selecting the “New Version” toggle on the Images section after searching for something on Bing. Once you opt in to this experience via the toggle, you will stay in this new experience during future searches.

Or jump right in and try it out now by clicking here and opting in to the experience. 

We can’t wait for you to experience a more guided and thoughtful way to explore images.

Stay tuned for even more updates and ways Bing is redefining search. 👀
 

In an AI-powered environment, search engines don’t simply index pages — more so than ever, they interpret intent, generate summaries, and surface synthesized answers. That shift fundamentally changes the user experience.

The question is no longer simply what content exists. Even more than in the past, it is what content becomes visible first — especially when users are navigating vulnerable or high-risk moments.

Ensuring that trusted information remains prominent is therefore not a secondary feature. It is structural to how modern search operates.

At Bing this challenge is addressed through advanced safety protections built directly into the search experience, designed to prioritize trusted information while keeping users in control.

Advanced safety protections built into AI-powered search
As AI reshapes how answers are generated and surfaced in search, Bing's goal continues to be to provide credible and authoritative results, while taking steps to protect users.

Bing’s approach brings together:

1. Risk detection at the query level
2. Contextual intervention through PSAs
3. Elevation of authoritative resources
4. User-controlled filtering via SafeSearch

These AI-powered safety protections work together to reduce harmful content and connect people to trusted information at every stage of the search experience.

Surfacing resources when users need them most
Self-harm, domestic abuse, eating disorders, CSAM child safety, medical emergencies. In those moments where someone may be at risk, search should do more than rank results – a search engine can provide fast support, as well as deterrence messaging in these key moments. For example, for many years now, Bing has surfaced warnings where a user query suggests they may be trying to find child sexual abuse material online.

Example of a Public Safety Announcement in the Netherlands

Bing surfaces Public Safety Announcements (PSAs) — contextual support boxes that appear at the top of the results page on certain topics when a user’s search query may create risks or signal they need help. These interventions:

• Aim to provide clear, authoritative guidance
• Link to verified hotlines and support organizations
• Are localized by country
• Offer reporting pathways, where available and relevant

The goal is simple but critical:
When risk is detected, support should be more visible than harm. We aim to work with external partners and organizations to craft messaging appropriate to each scenario and are continuing to evolve our approach, as well as the locations where such PSAs are available. For example, we have recently added new PSAs highlighting where users affected by the release of their intimate imagery without consent can report that harm.

Giving Users Clear Control
Safety is not only about intervention. It is also about user agency.

SafeSearch provides users with direct control over the visibility of explicit content in their Bing results. Three modes are available:

• Strict – blocks explicit text, images, and videos
• Moderate – filters and blurs explicit visuals
• Off – permits content where legally allowed

Bing defaults SafeSearch to Strict when a user is identified as under 18, is using a child‑managed account (through Microsoft Family Safety) or where local law requires heightened protections for minors.

Importantly, filtering is visible. When content is restricted, a banner clarifies why.

Transparency reinforces trust.

Trust as Infrastructure
As AI-powered search continues to evolve, Bing is keeping trust front and center.
Trust must be engineered into the user experience.

Public Safety Announcements and SafeSearch are not peripheral features — they are visible signals of how the system prioritizes support, clarity, and user control.

As search continues to evolve toward more generative and real-time answers, the responsibility to surface trusted information becomes even more central.

Keeping trusted content visible is therefore not just a product feature.
It is foundational to how AI-powered search should function.

Read more

• SafeSearch: Turn Bing SafeSearch on or off – Microsoft Support
• Bing Search: How Bing delivers search results – Microsoft Support

Authored by Elena Yndurain, Principal Product Manager, and the Responsible AI Defensive Team, Microsoft AI

Introduction 

For decades, search engines have relied on large–scale indexing systems to help people discover information on the web. The infrastructure behind this – crawling billions of pages, evaluating content quality, ranking results by relevance – became the backbone of how people navigate the internet. This model has worked extraordinarily well, and it still does. 

But AI systems (for example, AI agents, companions, and generative AI answers embedded in search and apps) don't navigate the internet the way humans do. And that changes the indexing problem in fundamental ways. 

Two Systems, Two Responsibilities 

Traditional search and grounding systems share the same foundation – crawling, understanding, and ranking the web – but they are optimized for fundamentally different outcomes. 

Traditional search asks: which pages should a user visit? Grounding asks: what information can an AI system responsibly use to construct a response? These questions sound similar. They are not. The table below provides a breakdown of key considerations: 

What Traditional Search Indexing Optimizes For

Traditional indexing answers a simple question: which pages should a user visit? The goal is recall and breadth – surface as many relevant options as possible and let the user choose. The unit of value is the document: a page that ranks well, that a human can skim, evaluate, and act on. 

That simplicity is a feature. Search was designed for humans who can scan a results page, skip the results that don’t fit, and course–correct in real time. The index does not need to be right about every result – it needs to be right enough that the user finds what they are looking for. 

What Changes When the Goal Is Grounding AI Answers 

Grounding an AI–generated answer introduces a fundamentally different constraint: the system is no longer just pointing to information, it is using it. The goal shifts from “fetch the best documents” to “fetch the best information to synthesize into a reliable, verifiable answer.” 

Instead of just ranking pages, the index must help an AI system determine which specific information can responsibly support an answer. The unit of value shifts from documents to groundable information – discrete, supportable facts with clear provenance. When an AI system presents an answer, multiple sources might collapse into a single statement and errors can compound across reasoning steps. Grounding practices therefore emphasize source identification so users can validate claims or explore further when needed. Grounding consequently emphasizes high-quality source identification and attribution so users (and downstream systems) can verify what was used and follow the evidence when needed. In this setting, the system must decide not only what to answer, but whether the evidence is sufficient to answer at all. Abstention is a valid outcome when support is missing, stale, or conflicting – it reflects a deliberate judgment about what the available evidence can justify.

What the Index Must Measure Differently 

This is where the two systems diverge most concretely. The metrics a search optimizes for are not the same metrics grounding needs to track – and closing that gap requires rethinking what “index quality” means from the ground up. 

Traditional search quality is largely measured through user behavior and ranking performance. The index asks: is the most relevant content being surfaced at the top? Are users finding what they need? Is content fresh enough to be useful for ranking? Are near–duplicate pages being collapsed efficiently? These measures all assume a human in the loop who can scan, skip, and self–correct. A stale result is a ranking problem. A missed document is a coverage gap. Both matter – but neither is catastrophic, because the user can recover. 

Grounding changes what the index needs to account for, in ways that are both more demanding and harder to measure. Factual fidelity becomes critical: does the indexed representation of a page accurately preserve the meaning of the original content? The processes of breaking content into retrievable chunks and transforming it for fast lookup can distort page substance in ways that never appear in any ranking signal. Source attribution quality matters in an entirely new way – not all indexed content carries equal evidentiary weight for an AI answer, and the index needs to understand that distinction. 

Freshness failure carries a categorically different cost. In search, stale content degrades ranking. In grounding, a stale fact produces a misleading response. The index must also account for coverage gaps in high–value content – not just whether the web is broadly indexed, but whether the specific facts and sources that people are likely to ask about are actually available and groundable. And when two indexed sources contradict each other, a grounding index cannot simply surface one above the other and move on. It needs to register that conflict, because an AI system that silently arbitrates between contradictory sources is one that may confidently assert the wrong thing. 

The shift in what gets measured reflects a deeper shift in what the index is responsible for. A search function is accountable for surfacing options. A grounding function is accountable for the quality of evidence it provides to an AI system that will commit to an answer which the users may subsequently verify.

Grounding Builds on Search 

A common misconception is that grounding replaces search. It does not. Grounding builds on the same foundational infrastructure – the same crawlers, the same quality signals, the same deep understanding of the web – but it adds a new optimization layer on top. 

Grounding is about determining what information can responsibly support a claim and having the discipline to withhold when the evidence is not there. The infrastructure is shared. The purpose is different. 

Retrieval Becomes a System, Not a Step 

Traditional search is typically a single interaction: query in, ranked results out. The simplicity of that model is a feature – it is fast, predictable, and easy to reason about. 

Grounding operates in loops. A system grounding an AI answer may need to ask follow–up questions, refine retrieval based on intermediate results, combine evidence from multiple sources, and re–evaluate when confidence is low. This changes the error profile of the index entirely – in particular the retrieval systems. If early retrieval steps introduce subtle errors, those errors compound through subsequent reasoning steps in ways that no human reviewer would catch in real time. Grounding systems cannot rely on the safety net that search provides – where a user scans results, skips irrelevant hits, and course–corrects on the fly. Retrieval systems must therefore optimize not just for one–shot retrieval, but for consistent, repeatable behavior across iterative use. 

The Bigger Picture 

Indexing for grounded AI answers is not a reinvention of search – it is a major evolution of it. Grounding commits to an answer. This is not a surface–level evolution. 

The shift we described at the opening is worth restating plainly: search indexing was built to help humans decide what to read. Grounding indexing is being built to help AI systems decide what to say. The infrastructure required to do those two things well is not the same – even when it starts from the same foundation. 

What makes this hard is not the technology gap – it is the measurement gap. We have decades of practice measuring search quality. We are still learning what it means to measure grounding quality rigorously: not just whether an answer was retrieved, but whether the evidence behind it was accurate, fresh, attributable, and consistent. 

Search optimizes for likelihood of relevance. Grounding must measure strength of evidence. Understanding that difference is not just an engineering concern. It is the starting point for building AI systems that people can actually trust. For a practical perspective on what this shift means for content creators, see our blog post from November 2025 on Optimizing content for inclusion in the era of AI, which outlines concrete steps to make information easier to interpret, cite, and verify in AI experiences. Bing Webmaster Tools can complement that guidance helping you use real performance data to refine what you publish and how you structure it for AI-driven discovery.

Krishna Madhavan, Knut Risvik, Meenaz Merchant
Microsoft AI

It’s for this reason, we’re excited to announce we’ve open-sourced our industry leading embeddings model built to support the agentic web. 

Grounding quality is determined long before a model produces its final answer. In production systems, stronger embeddings translate into higher factual accuracy through better first-pass retrieval, lower latency and cost through fewer retries and smaller contexts, and more stable agent behavior across multi-step tasks.

In the agent era, this capability matters even more. Agents must search across diverse sources, maintain memory over time, and update context across multiple steps. In these environments, embeddings are not just a retrieval primitive. They are a foundational layer for memory, ranking, and orchestration.

Enter Harrier.

Harrier is a new embedding model series designed for the demands of modern AI systems. It is our latest open-source text embedding model series, delivering state-of-the-art performance and ranking 1^st on the multilingual MTEB-v2 benchmark (as of April 6, 2026). This result reflects Microsoft’s sustained commitment to improve grounding quality through advances in embedding models.

(Image source retrieved on April 6, 2026 – cropped for clarity)

Better embeddings lead to better retrieval, surfacing the right information more often and ranking it higher, which in turn can improve the final user experience: often with more accurate answers, fewer hallucinations, better citations, and stronger multilingual performance. In other words, Harrier’s benchmark gains translate into more reliable grounding in real-world systems.

Harrier is designed not only to improve embedding quality in isolation, but to strengthen the full grounding pipeline that modern AI systems depend on. It supports more than 100 languages, offers a 32k context window, and produces fixed-size embeddings for each input, enabling seamless integration with vector search systems.

Technical overview
We started by developing a scalable data pipeline that gathers multilingual text pairs from multiple sources and uses GPT-5 to generate a wide range of synthetic data. This process resulted in more than 2 billion weakly-supervised data examples for contrastive pre-training and over 10 million high-quality examples for fine-tuning. To ensure the highest standards, we applied thorough data filtering and rewrote the data using large language models, when necessary. After preparing the dataset, we trained our flagship model and then used it as a teacher for knowledge distillation, enhancing the performance of smaller embedding models.

Key technical ideas
Building upon our prior work in text embeddings, including E5, Multilingual E5, E5-mistral, and GritLM, we incorporated several approaches to advance the state of text embeddings:

1. Large-scale contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning. By scaling the dataset size throughout both the contrastive pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we observed consistent improvements in performance.
2. Synthetic data generation. Utilizing frontier models such as GPT-5, we generated multilingual text pairs at scale, employing a variety of synthesis strategies to enhance data diversity.
3. Knowledge distillation. LLM-based re-rankers produced high-quality training signals and efficiently filter noisy data. Our smaller models benefit from knowledge distillation, receiving guidance from larger teacher models during training.

Evaluation
We evaluate on the multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark. For deployment on low-end devices, we trained two smaller models: Harrier-OSS-v1-0.6b and Harrier-OSS-v1-270m.

The table indicates that our model outperforms other open-source embedding models. The "Borda Count Rank" reflects the hypothetical ranking as of March 16 and may change with future submissions.

Compared with leading proprietary models, we are operating at the frontier of embedding quality and efficiency.

What comes next
The work behind Harrier is not just a model release. It is part of a broader effort to build the next generation of grounding systems for the agent era.

Drawing on the same core advances, we are developing a new grounding service designed to deliver better retrieval quality, stronger semantic understanding, and more robust context selection at scale. These innovations will also be coming to Bing, bringing the benefits of this new embedding foundation into real user experiences.

The future of capable agents will depend not only on reasoning and generation, but on how effectively they are grounded in the world. Harrier is a meaningful step toward making that possible — and we're just getting started.

Authors: Xiaolong Huang, Liang Wang, Furu Wei, Jingwen Lu, Knut Risvik, Jason Li 

And that’s just the top of the drop. Every single day, thousands of Instant Win prizes are up for grabs. Many of these chances come from something you already do: searching on Bing. Each search gives you another shot at an Instant Win, and another way to earn bonus entries.

This is where the fun really begins. Everyday things you’re already doing could turn into real chances to win. Search for what you love. Check out what’s trending. Play Jewel on Xbox. Test‑drive Microsoft 365. Browse with Edge. Keep Copilot close by when you download the app. Explore the newest PCs. Real actions, real prizes, real people. Just ask Ivan from Singapore, our most recent winner, who scored the $1 million prize in the Ultimate Giveaway. Could you be next?

The Total Prize Drop is only here for a limited time. If you’re already a Microsoft Rewards member, your first entry is FREE and waiting for you. Not a member yet?? Signing up takes just a moment. Do it now and grab that free entry.

Why join Microsoft Rewards?
With Microsoft Rewards, it’s easy to earn points for doing things you already enjoy, like searching, gaming, and shopping. You can redeem your points for gift cards, subscriptions, bonus entries into sweepstakes, and much more. And remember, with the Total Prize Drop, you could even win $1,000,000 USD cash or a customizable Mercedes‑Benz car.

Enter today. Total Prize Drop ends May 21, 2026.

_{Sweepstakes + Instant Win: United States, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Japan, France, Spain, Mexico, Austria, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, South Africa, Czech Republic, Greece, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Finland, Romania, Luxembourg
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Instant Win and Sweepstakes: Ends 5/21/26 at 11:59:59 PM PT. Must be age of majority to enter. For Official Rules, including odds, and prize descriptions, see Instant Win rules: https://aka.ms/win-IW-Rules and Sweepstakes rules: https://aka.ms/win-Sweeps-Rules. Sweepstakes open only to legal residents of the 50 United States, D.C. & P.R., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Greece, Finland, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, New Zealand, Japan, the Czech Republic, Romania and South Africa. Sweepstakes Grand Prize: one (1) prize of $1,000,000 USD in cash (equivalent to approximately $1,380,000 CAD / £740,000 GBP / €860,000 EUR / Fr. 800,000 CHF / kr 10,100,000 NOK / $18,000,000 MXN / S/ 3,400,000 PEN / ₡498 000 000 CRC / Q7,000,000 GTQ / $1,730,000 NZD / ¥157,000,000 JPY / Kč 20,800,000 CZK / lei 4,350,000 RON / R 16,500,000 ZAR). Grand Prize will be awarded in USD dollars. Free Entries into the Grand Prize Draw with Microsoft Rewards Account: print full name, address, phone number (with area code), date of birth, and email address on a 3 x 5-inch card and mail it to “Microsoft Rewards Prize Drop Sweepstakes, Free to Enter” at the address corresponding to your country of residence in the Sweepstakes Official Rules. Requests must be postmarked by 5/21/26 and received by 5/29/26. Additional Sweepstakes entry opportunities will be available, see terms here. These additional entry methods are subject to the Sweepstakes Official Rules for the Sweepstakes including (but not limited to) any and all eligibility and registration requirements, as well as any limitation on the total number of entries which may be earned across all entry methods. Connect time charges may apply. Canadian and Mexican residents: Skill-testing question applies. Void where prohibited.}

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At Microsoft, we’ve been steadily advancing grounding technology for a while, building on decades of operating large‑scale search and information systems through Bing and focusing on scale, reliability, and trust. 

And today, Microsoft grounding powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market. 

While much of our work happens behind the scenes, it plays an essential and profound role in today’s AI ecosystem, providing users with answers that are fluent, factually correct, and genuinely helpful. 

Since the early days of the Internet, users have been browsing with typical patterns: typing queries, clicking on results, and selecting content that best shapes their needs. However, as AI assistants do more of the work, it’s the agents doing the browsing – and with far more precision – acting more as retrievers, drawn to structured, verifiable, and applicable content. This changes the needs of the web’s infrastructure, and therefore the infrastructure it’s built on. Enter grounding.

This is driving the emergence of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of understanding how content participates in AI-driven experiences. In an AI‑first world, visibility is no longer defined only by rankings or clicks. It’s about how content contributes to answers, citations, reasoning, and ultimately, outcomes. 

To help content owners navigate this shift, we are introducing new visibility through updates to Bing Webmaster Tools. These capabilities provide early insight into how content contributes to AI-generated experiences, including citation and grounding signals. Think of this as a first window into a broader GEO toolset, one that will continue to evolve as AI becomes a more central interface to information.  

This moment matters because it sets the context. Grounding is becoming a foundational layer of the AI ecosystem – the connective tissue between generative models and the world’s information.  As that layer becomes more important, transparency and collaboration with the web community matter more, not less. 

Our goal is to keep strengthening this infrastructure while giving publishers clearer insight into how their content participates in AI-driven experiences, and how they can benefit from it.  

There is much more coming in the months ahead. Stay tuned. 

Jordi Ribas
Corporate Vice President, Search & AI

Listening First: What Business Owners Told Us
Before we wrote a single line of code, we spent months listening to business owners about their challenges and goals. Our research revealed a few consistent themes:

• We need to make Bing Places for Business more discoverable to help business owners to claim their business in Bing
• The portal needs to be simplified and built with the same design principles as the rest of our products.
• Importing should be seamless. Business owners wanted to seamlessly import all their businesses to Bing without spending a lot of time by claiming or adding their business manually.

We took these insights to heart and rebuilt the experience from the ground up.

A Unified Experience Under Bing.com
One of the most significant changes is the migration of the entire business owner’s experience into the Bing.com domain. This move simplifies access, improves trust, and aligns Bing Places with the broader Bing ecosystem. Whether you're claiming a listing, updating business hours, or uploading photos, everything now lives in one cohesive space.

As part of this transition, the domain will change from www.bingplaces.com to www.bing.com/forbusiness, making it easier for business owners to find and manage their listings directly within the Bing experience.

The new experience is now live and will continue adding further features in the following months to ensure a complete and polished rollout. Our current users and their business listings will be automatically migrated to the new account and current users will be redirected to this brand-new experience when they login with their Bing Places for Business credentials.

Smarter Imports, Smoother Management
We’ve made major improvements to how business owners import listings from Google. The new import flow is faster, more reliable, and better at preserving key attributes like business name, hours, and contact details. Once imported, managing listings is easier than ever—with intuitive dashboards, bulk editing tools, and real-time status updates.

Introducing the Recommendation Tool
Launching alongside the new experience is our Recommendation Tool, designed to help new business owners enrich their listings with high-impact information that can help drive more engagement with your listing. Using listing health signals and the segment of the business, the tool suggests business owners:

• Add Photos that attract attention
• Add key missing Business details that drive engagement like website link, hours of operations, social media links
• Segment specific suggestions like adding a menu link or online order link for restaurants

This feature is especially helpful for owners who are new to local SEO and want to stand out in Bing search results.

What’s Next
This launch is just the beginning. We are continuing to invest in features that make Bing Places for Business more powerful and accessible—from deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot to expanded support for agencies and other partners.

We invite all business owners to explore the new Bing Places for Business and see how easy it is to claim, manage, and grow your presence on Bing.

👉 https://www.bing.com/forbusiness

Please use our support channels to share your feedback. It will help us plan and prioritize future features and enhancements.

We’re thrilled to share that Bing Image Creator now includes the latest GPT-4o image generation model – for free. This upgrade delivers you even more intelligence, flexibility, and options; GPT-4o joins the existing DALL-E3 model many of you know and love so you can turn your ideas into stunning visuals with greater ease, confidence, and control.

Finding what you need is just the beginning. Bing, as your AI-powered search and answer engine, gives you the freedom to create exactly what you’re looking for.

To get started creating with GPT-4o, visit bing.com/create, open the Bing app, create directly in Copilot Search, or type directly in your Bing search bar or Edge address bar.**

Bing Image Creator, now with GPT-4o

In 2023, Bing Image Creator brought the power of AI image generation to everyone, for free. It’s always been our mission to give you the tools to satisfy your curiosity.

That’s why starting today Bing Image Creator offers you the choice of two models to fit your needs: GPT-4o and DALL-E3. GPT-4o delivers a major leap in image generation quality, bringing users an upgraded experience with more creative and photorealistic visuals as well as a deeper understanding of detailed prompts – including improved rendering of text and fine details. Whether you’re crafting a mood board, visualizing a product idea, or simply exploring your imagination, GPT-4o brings your vision to life with richer image generation.

We recognize that creativity is nothing without freedom. That’s why now, with just a click, you can switch models to DALL-E3 to not only get quick AI image generation, but also more options to choose from – all with the same look and feel you’ve been accustomed to from Bing Image Creator.

Bing Image Creator is available on all platforms world-wide,*** including bing.com/create and within Copilot Search.

Bing Image Creator remains free to use with 15 fast creations available.*

Let your imagination run wild
We can’t wait to see what you create. To kickstart your imagination, check out two of our favorite examples below:

Prompt: A large koi fish swimming through the clouds with lanterns floating around and a crescent moon in the background – in dreamy pastel tones, realistic

Prompt: A beautiful, square, detailed, elegant, modern, scientific infographic titled “Phases of the Moon,” with illustrations for each phase, and a starry background

Try it today
Ready to create something amazing? Head to bing.com/create, open the Bing app, create directly in Copilot Search, or type directly in your Bing search bar or Edge address bar** to try Bing Image Creator.

*15 daily fast creations. Thereafter, fast creations will require 10 Rewards points per creation. Standard speed creations are unlimited.
**Bing as default search engine required
***Except Russia and China