Bing Generative Search: An In-Depth Analysis of Bing’s Response to Google AI Overviews

Overall, it's hard to see why this is better than a regular search engine with AI at the top of every search result. Copilot's current AI in search is much cleaner and shows the sites from which the information came directly under the result. This change follows the earlier addition of AI search summaries through Microsoft's Copilot technology. Returned in the relatedSearches.value key (array of related searches) in the official API, our API returns the equivalent in the top level related_searches key (array of related searches).

Bing Is Copying Google Search's AI Overviews

Today, we are releasing an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that exposes our web search API to AI agents and developers through a familiar and common interface. It's also worth taking a look at our Bing Playground and performing a few searches to see it all in action. The Bing search URL found at images.webSearchUrl in the official API can be found at inline_images.see_more_link in ours. Returned in the images.value key (array of images) in the official API, our API returns the equivalent in the inline_images.items key (array of images). The date attribute in our API will return the date displayed in the result, though it can be in the form of a formatted date (e.g. Oct 29, 2020) or a relative date (e.g. 3 days ago).
While the BGS has visible search results next to the summary on desktop, on mobile the results are located below the summary. This has a significant impact on the visibility of organic search results. AI summaries for both Google and Bing take up a significant amount of space on the search results page. While BGS features a document index and search results surrounding its summary on the left and right, the AIO opts for a minimalist approach with white space surrounding the summary.

Why Bing’s Move to LLM/SLM Models Matters

Bing Generative Search is the latest entry into AI-enhanced search results. This approach not only aids in ranking for targeted keywords but also leverages the system’s broader criteria for content selection, potentially capturing additional traffic from related searches. This aspect of personalization in search results could customize the information to more closely address user needs.
When building summaries, the system evaluates documents responsive to the query but, if the top results are repetitive, it will explore documents responsive to related queries as well. Overall, Bing’s experience provides more (albeit mixed) visibility to the organic search results, which potentially helps lessen the impact of the summaries on clicks. When you enter a query in Bing, if the query is identified for an AI-enhanced search result, you will receive a BGS summary. In Google AIOs, the summary pushes the organic search results further down the page for both mobile and desktop. Bing Generative Search (BGS) is an AI-enhanced search result page that uses traditional search results, large language models (LLMs), and small language models. Microsoft enhances Bing search with new language models, claiming to reduce costs while delivering faster, more accurate results.

Related Search Result Mapping

Bing will soon prioritize AI-generated answers alongside traditional search results. The analysis of the SERP positions for the 18 URLs linked in the documents reveals a clear preference for top-ranked URLs, especially those in the top 2 positions. Given the limited data from just 18 queries, it’s too soon for definitive conclusions, but early observations offer some insights. What insights can we gain about influencing Bing Generative Search (BGS) to display specific URLs in its summaries?

  • To improve efficiency, we trained SLM models (~100x throughput improvement over LLM), which process and understand search queries more precisely.”
  • In the 18 examples observed, it appears that Bing’s Generative Search doesn’t just pull information from the top-ranking documents related to a query but also includes lower-ranking and unranked documents.
  • At the very top of the page will be an AI-generated answer created by large and small language models that have reviewed millions of sources to provide the most accurate answer.
  • This development promises to have a sizable impact on user experience as well as the visibility and engagement with the organic performance of content.
  • The company claims this new experience maintains the same number of clicks to websites that traditional search does, but time will tell if that’s true.
  • The official API’s response format differs from our own so there are still changes to make, but we’re part way there.

Microsoft unveils Bing Generative Search — enhanced with AI, it's a complete overhaul of traditional search

Instead of showing a list of blue links you usually see in search engines, it gives AI-generated summaries of answers. The Copilot Search mode will show a summary of what the user is searching for right on the page, including links to sources as well as to image and video searches. The images.readLink attribute in the official API which provides the URL for the equivalent API image search can be found at inline_images.serpapi_link in our API.

Link Diversity in Bing Generative Search

This new style is similar to other AI search engines like Perplexity, but Perplexity is a lot better overall in my opinion. Some answers even include direct links to gtbet casino login the websites for more details if you want to explore further. At the bottom of these summaries, you’ll find citations to check the sources. The search just looks like a page with text, which does the job but is hard to want to use more than once.
Returned in the webPages.value key (an array of results) in the official API, our API returns the equivalent in the top level organic_results key (an array of results). Next we're going to authenticate via the api_key query parameter and remove the headers entirely as they're not necessary for any calls to our endpoint. The search page will also list the sources that the AI-generated text was created from below the answer, and will even present traditional search results in a sidebar on the right for those who are uninterested in Bing's curated AI experience. Microsoft has announced a major update to Bing Search that overhauls the search results page with AI at the heart of its experience.

  • The new Bing Generative Search experience is rolling out to a small wave of users now, and will likely make its way to more Bing users over the coming months.
  • Currently available to a small subset of users, Bing Search now incorporates AI-generated answers in addition to traditional search results directly on the search page.
  • For the query, “how long can elephants live”, 3 URLs were in the top 10 results, 2 were out of the top 10, and 3 did not rank at all in the top 100 results for the query.
  • Moreover, Bing has taken a much stronger stance than Google in providing visibility to organic results and transparency in sourcing summary content.
  • Next we’re going to authenticate via the api_key query parameter and remove the headers entirely as they’re not necessary for any calls to our endpoint.
  • If your implementation is relatively simple and only uses the q and mkt parameters, then when you make these changes, you should see a full response come back from our endpoint at this stage.

It states “This summary wan generated using AI based on multiple online sources. In BGS, you have to select the information icon to see any type of warning to the searcher. You do not have to be signed in to Bing for the AI summary to appear. This provides more specificity and transparency regarding how the information in the summary is verified. A key distinction here is that Google uses text fragments in URLs to highlight relevant excerpts directly on the sourced document page, enhancing the specificity and transparency of the citations. To see the links, you have to select the arrow under each section.