Announcing new options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat

We’re excited to share new ways that webmasters have greater control over how their content is used in the AI era.

A few months ago, we announced our vision to reinvent search with the new AI-powered Microsoft Bing, delivering better search, more helpful answers, and a new chat experience. We’ve been excited about the reception to these features, and we have continued to meet with and seek feedback from the industry as part of our commitment to fostering a healthy web ecosystem. With the introduction of Bing Chat, some webmasters and publishers expressed the need for more control over use of their content. While we are actively collaborating with the industry on establishing future AI standards, we also wanted to provide more immediate support for publishers to address the concerns they raised when we met with them.

We are pleased to share that we have built on standard controls that webmasters use today to control indexing and snippet length on Bing in order to empower publishers to make choices about use of their content in Bing Chat and for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models. Webmasters have the choice of implementing these controls as follows:

  • No action is needed to remain in Bing Chat. Content without NOCACHE tag and without NOARCHIVE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers and will benefit from AI's ability to generate more helpful answers and to increase your ranking opportunities in Bing Chat; site content may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.

  • Content with the NOCACHE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers. We will only display URL/Snippet/Title in the answer; Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOCACHE, only URLs, Titles and Snippets may be used in training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.

  • Content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers, not be linked to in the answers. Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOARCHIVE, we will not use the content for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.

  • If content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, we will treat it as NOCACHE.

We also heard from publishers that they want to exercise these choices without impacting how Bing users can discover web content on Bing’s search results page. We can assure publishers that content with the NOCACHE tag or NOARCHIVE tag will still appear in our search results.

Webmasters who want strict control over their content can use the NOCACHE option to allow Bing Chat to refer to their websites. To help Bing chat users find paywall articles, we recommend adding the NOCACHE value to the NOARCHIVE value, since many paywall sites use only the NOARCHIVE tag.

Webmasters can set the NOCACHE value additionally to the NOARCHIVE value.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive, nocache">

Or webmasters can instruct Bing specifically to treat the content with NOCACHE:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> <meta name="bingbot" content="nocache">

As we collaborate with the industry on future AI standards, we will continue to communicate with publishers and web ecosystem. We will give reasonable time to adapt and migrate to future AI standards.

For more information, please read our documentation on meta tags.

Please reach out to Bing webmaster tools support if you face any issues or questions.

Fabrice Canel
Principal Product Manager
Microsoft - Bing

Back to
Top