What you get from Web IQ
Essentially, Web IQ is a set of AI-native grounding APIs. The difference between what Bing does for a person and what Web IQ does for an agent is not just in the name. A human will scan some headlines, click through and read an article. An AI agent requires structured evidence it can put right into a context window without post-processing.
Microsoft puts it simply: “We are a search engine for AI systems.” You won’t be presented with the usual page of ten blue links when an agent does a search. You’ll get passages and what they call “structured evidence” – pre-filtered, citation-ready material pulled from everything on the web, from news and trade data to video and images. The point is to remove the noise that would otherwise inflate the number of tokens and prevent inference.
It’s a practical solution to a developer’s problem. Every token an LLM chews up is a cost and a source of latency. If an API gives you full HTML, you have to put in the work of parsing and sanitizing it before it’s of any use. Web IQ is meant to save you the trouble by delivering content already formatted for direct injection.
The architecture behind
Web IQ runs on Bing’s global index, so it has access to billions of documents in over 100 languages ​​and markets. It’s an advantage over newer competitors that you can’t easily build from scratch. But Microsoft is quick to point out that the recovery stack is finished. “You can’t solve for agent time by tweaking a component,” the company says. “We had to rebuild the system from the ground up.”
To do semantic retrieval instead of just keyword matching, the system projects information into vector space using Microsoft’s open-source embedding model. For speed, it extends DiskANN to handle large disk-resident indexes without having to load them all into memory. This is critical for agent workloads where repeated calls in a multistage chain can turn a small delay into a bottleneck.
By Microsoft’s numbers, Web IQ is nearly 2.5 times faster than you’d find with other options under the same test conditions, with sub-165 millisecond P95 latency across five global data centers. And as the volume of results increases, they say you get the same quality with fewer tokens. “Fewer tokens in, better answers out, lower cost per call,” is how they put it.
They measure quality with GDSAT (grounding satisfaction) to see if the evidence is fresh, authoritative and really useful for downstream reasoning, rather than just relevant on paper. In production, they claim that Web IQ scores higher than the rest.
Then there is the competition
The field is well populated. Exa has its sub-200 millisecond instant searches and JSON outputs. Tavily, which Nebius picked up in February for as much as $400 million, is popular in LangChain circles for its LLM-optimized snippets. You have Parallel, the $2 billion operation from ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, focused on deep research. Brave Search API has its own independent index and the best latency in some benchmarks at 669 milliseconds. Perplexity Sonar combines answer generation with search.
Microsoft sees three ways to stand out. One is the sheer breadth of the index after twenty years of building Bing, especially for non-English and niche verticals. Two are passage-level retrieval; While Exa can give you highlights and Tavily a snippet, Web IQ provides structured evidence objects for the agent. And third, they want to make it clear that Web IQ is MCP native via JSON-RPC 2.0 and model-agnostic. It is not necessary to be attached to Azure’s inference stack to use it. Currently, Web IQ is something you can only get if you’re a select enterprise customer with Microsoft account teams putting in the word. There’s no word on pricing, and when it will be generally available is anyone’s guess. As it stands, that puts it out of reach for the indie developer or small team that would rather put down a credit card and have Exa or Tavily up and running in minutes.
Content Publishers and SEO: What to Do About It
Web IQ is a new variable in the visibility equation for publishers. Where traditional SEO is about ranking for human searchers, AI search optimization (or what some call Generative Engine Optimization) is about being cited by AI. Web IQ is the infrastructure behind these quotes.
You could say that Microsoft has been telegraphing this change for months. They have launched tools like AI citation data in Bing Webmaster Tools since February 2026, and in March they mapped grounding queries to the pages being cited. At SEO Week, they even previewed Citation Share. It’s all about showing publishers how their content is being used by AI systems, with Web IQ as the discovery layer doing the heavy lifting.
But there is an important difference: Web IQ is about passages, not entire pages. A page might have the domain authority and backlinks to rank well on Bing for a human, but if the good stuff is buried in a wall of text or obscured by ads and JavaScript, Web IQ’s models are likely to pass it over for a cleaner source. That means easy HTML accessibility and semantic structure are more important than ever. An AI crawler can read a page in seconds; If your core content is hidden behind an interactive element or needs JS to render, it’s effectively invisible to the agents. You’ll want clear headings, form marking, and a concise summary to give your passage a better chance of being selected as evidence.
Microsoft says Web IQ follows the same bot exclusion protocols and publisher preferences as Bing, and it’s working with the IETF on standards for AI web access. By default, it will respect robots.txt, which is of interest to publishers wary of how their data is used for AI training, although the broader legal and ethical issues are yet to be resolved.
Integration for developers
On the technical side, Web IQ is an agent-based platform with direct API access and a degree of control over orchestration that you don’t get with the likes of “Grounding with Bing Search” — an add-on for the Azure AI Foundry Agent Service that runs $14 per 1,000 transactions and is intended for more conventional Azure workflows. With Web IQ, you can use REST, MCP via JSON-RPC 2.0 or an SDK, send queries in natural language or structured form. The API returns you a JSON payload with all the provenance data, titles, and snippets you need, ready for the model’s context window without post-processing.
Nasdaq is among the early adopters. Mohsin Shafqat, their director of software engineering, has said it allows them to tap in external data quickly without having to plug into another system or compromise security. It’s an enterprise-first approach, and one suspects that Microsoft wants to see production AI workloads at scale before letting the general developer community in.
FAQ
What is Microsoft Web IQ?
Think of it as a set of AI-native grounding APIs. It’s built on the Bing index, but re-architected for machine reasoning, not human browsing, to connect AI assistants to relevant information from the web.
How does it compare to Bing?
Bing is for people to read and click. Web IQ is for AI agents to reason with. It delivers structured evidence objects and passages in a way that is more token-efficient and suitable for multi-step workflows. So what is grounding satisfaction and why is it important to Microsoft? Simply put, GDSAT is the company’s way of quantifying whether the information you’ve retrieved is useful for an AI agent’s reasoning. It is a more thorough measure than a standard relevance score, checking that the evidence is complete, recent, authoritative, and actually serves the task at hand.
When it comes to speed, Web IQ is hard to beat. Microsoft puts P95 latency at under 165 milliseconds, which they say is almost 2.5 times what you’d get from similar APIs. To put that in perspective, independent tests show the Brave Search API running at an average of 669ms and Tavily anywhere from 210ms to 4500ms on complex searches.
Is this the new Bing Search API?
