Microsoft set to pull the plug on Bing Search APIs in favor of AI alternative

Devs told to swap raw results for LLM-generated summaries as August shutdown looms

Microsoft is retiring Bing Search APIs on August 11, directing customers toward AI products as an alternative.

The Bing Search APIs allowed users to add search capabilities to their applications. The latest APIs included image, video, news, and web search.

There are also organizations, such as DuckDuckGo, that source some search results from Bing.

Microsoft confirmed: "Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup."

While users with longstanding agreements or contracts with Microsoft, like DuckDuckGo, will reportedly not be immediately affected, the message is clear: stop using the Bing Search APIs and rely on summaries generated by the company's LLMs.

Microsoft added: "Customers may want to consider Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents. Grounding with Bing Search allows Azure AI Agents to incorporate real-time public web data when generating responses with an LLM."

The solution may not satisfy customers used to raw search results. It's also not as if the service was free – Microsoft charged customers for using the APIs, and massively hiked the price in 2023. The increases were as much as 900 percent, depending on a customer's tier.

Companies that absorbed the increases at the time now have another decision to make. Without Bing's search index immediately on tap, the choice is to either select another solution – the Brave Search API or Mojeek's Web Search API are two options – or accept the AI-powered alternative Microsoft suggests.

One Reddit user described the impending discontinuation of the Bing Search APIs as the "end of an era."

The action might indeed represent the end of an era, but it is also understandable (if unpalatable) considering the move to AI summaries in search results and the use of services such as ChatGPT instead of traditional search tools.

The aggressive timeline is, however, not so understandable. August 11 is not far away, and considering the statement that "any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely," affected developers will not have long to move to an alternative. ®