What are the alternatives to the Bing Search API?

Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025 and points to Grounding with Bing Search, which returns model answers, not raw results. For raw results, use Brave Search API, Exa, Perplexity Search API, Parallel, Tavily or Mojeek, or Microsoft's Web IQ for passages from the Bing index.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder (grounder.net) publishes this page and routes searches to several of the providers below, including Brave, Exa, Parallel, Perplexity and Tavily. Grounder does not search Bing.

Quick comparison

What Microsoft retired

Microsoft's lifecycle notice, dated 15 May 2025, reads: "Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11, 2025. Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available to be used or new customer signup." It encourages customers to migrate to Grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents. The Register reported the same day that DuckDuckGo and other long-standing customers "will reportedly not be immediately affected"; we found no Microsoft page that confirms which contracts continue.

The options

Grounding with Bing Search (Microsoft)

• What it is: A Bing-backed tool in Foundry Agent Service; the model writes the query and you receive a cited answer, not results.
• Pricing: $14 per 1,000 transactions (a transaction is a tool call in a run), plus model tokens. Only paid and pay-as-you-go Azure subscriptions are eligible.
• Strengths: Bing index, built-in citations, managed in Foundry.
• Limits: Foundry does not return the tool output to developers or end users. Microsoft's terms bar copying, storing, caching or archiving the output and using it to train AI models, and customer data leaves the Azure compliance boundary.
• Pick it when: you already run agents in Foundry and want a cited answer.

Web IQ (Microsoft)

• What it is: Microsoft's Bing-index API, released 2 June 2026. It returns ranked passages as JSON, with no generated answer.
• Pricing: $7 per 1,000 calls for web, news, images and video; $1 for browse (prices from 16 October 2026).
• Strengths: Bing index, an official MCP server, 15 queries per second by default.
• Limits: Paid Azure subscription; no free tier or SLA; no date-range filter on web search; excluded from Microsoft's Data Protection Addendum; caching and display are restricted.
• Pick it when: you want the Bing index as passages and accept Microsoft's rules.

Brave Search API

• What it is: Search on Brave's own index (no fallback to Google or Bing, per Brave), plus an LLM Context endpoint for extracted chunks.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests; $5 monthly free credit, which Brave's blog ties to attributing Brave; a card is requested at signup.
• Strengths: 50 queries per second. Artificial Analysis scored LLM Context 74.6 (measured 27 August 2026) and plain Web 64.6 (17 August 2026).
• Limits: Terms bar storing results or training AI on them without a storage-rights plan (no public price). Local MCP server only.
• Pick it when: you want raw results from an independent index and do not store them.

Exa

• What it is: Own-index semantic search that returns highlights, text or summaries per result.
• Pricing: $7 per 1,000 requests (auto, 10 results) or $4 (lite); $10 of free credit a month, no card.
• Strengths: Artificial Analysis scored auto 80.3 and lite 79.2 (measured 19 October 2026), both with dynamic highlights. SOC 2 Type II.
• Limits: Dynamic Highlights is a preview (auto without it scored 73.7, measured 17 August 2026). Default 10 queries per second.
• Pick it when: you want relevance-ranked results with page content in one call.

Perplexity Search API

• What it is: Raw ranked results from Perplexity's index, with no generated answer.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 with fast search; no free tier is published.
• Strengths: Artificial Analysis scored medium 80.0 (measured 27 August 2026). 50 query units per second at every tier; OAuth MCP.
• Limits: Its privacy page says zero data retention is not the default; its FAQ says the API retains no query data.
• Pick it when: you want raw results with country, language and domain filters.

Parallel Search API

• What it is: Search on Parallel's own index: an objective in, ranked excerpts out.
• Pricing: $1 per 1,000 requests (turbo, fast) or $5 (basic, advanced); $5 of free credit a month, card on file.
• Strengths: 600 requests a minute; a free anonymous MCP server. Artificial Analysis scored advanced 74.8 (measured 17 August 2026).
• Limits: Turbo is English and Japanese only; robots.txt compliance is not stated.
• Pick it when: you want ranked excerpts from a full-web index at $1 per 1,000 requests.

Tavily

• What it is: A search and extraction API with crawl, map and research endpoints.
• Pricing: $0.008 per credit pay as you go; a basic search is 1 credit ($8 per 1,000). 1,000 free credits a month.
• Strengths: 1,000 requests per minute on production keys; in the Claude connectors directory.
• Limits: Artificial Analysis scored basic 65.6 (measured 17 August 2026), below Exa and Perplexity. Its privacy policy says Tavily may use query data to improve responses to future queries.
• Pick it when: you need search plus extract, crawl and research from one vendor.

Mojeek Web Search API

• What it is: Search on Mojeek's own index and crawler (MojeekBot, which it says respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol). The Register named it as an alternative.
• Pricing: £2 per 1,000 requests (Startup) or £3 (Business), excluding VAT; the Startup plan includes a free credit of an unstated amount, and the page says a bank card is required.
• Strengths: An independent index.
• Limits: Startup allows 5 queries per second, 100,000 requests a day and 10 results per request; Business allows 10 per second, 400,000 a day and 40 results. We did not check MCP support or quality.
• Pick it when: you want an independent index priced in pounds and do not need an MCP server.

SerpApi (Bing engine)

• What it is: A scraper API that returns Bing results as JSON (engine=bing), with many other engines available.
• Pricing: From $25 a month for 1,000 searches to $1.96 per 1,000 at 54,000,000 a month (the largest plan); 250 free a month.
• Strengths: Returns Bing's own results; official MCP server.
• Limits: Scraped, not licensed. Google sued SerpApi under the DMCA in December 2025; a court dismissed both claims on 20 July 2026, with leave to amend on part. Google filed an amended complaint on 10 August 2026 and SerpApi asked the court to dismiss it in late August; we found no ruling.
• Pick it when: you need Bing's own results and accept the scraping risk.

Where Grounder fits

Grounder is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents. One search goes across 10 web search providers (Ozone, Tavily, Exa, Brave, Perplexity, You.com, Firecrawl, Octen, Parallel and Valyu), results are deduplicated, and each is marked with its provider and whether it is licensed. It returns ranked results, not a generated answer, and it does not search Bing or Google.

• Licensed sources only is on by default for signed-up accounts: a search returns only licensed results and can return fewer than top_k. Turn it off on the account page, or per search with routing_settings.licensed_only set to false.
• New search keys are no longer made. Agents connect over MCP and sign in; the HTTP API accepts only keys made before 13 October 2026.
• Search records are kept indefinitely; processors are named on /privacy. Microsoft says Grounding with Bing sends customer data outside the Azure compliance boundary.
• No storage or redistribution rights are published for the providers' results.

Grounder's benchmark, run by Grounder, searched 887 questions on each provider's default search. Table as of 20 October 2026 05:22 UTC:

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Grounder optimized is what a signed-up account gets by default; the all-sources row is the same routing with nothing filtered out. Both Grounder rows are routed as Grounder routes on 19 October 2026, and that routing was tuned on these same searches. On SimpleQA the all-sources row is first (97.8%, against 96.0% for Octen and Perplexity); on SealQA Parallel (44.9%) is ahead of it (36.1%). With Licensed sources only on, Grounder scores below every single provider except Ozone on both benchmarks; all 12 rows are on /benchmarks.

• Pick it when: your agent speaks MCP and you want one connection to 10 search providers with licensed results flagged. Skip it if you need an HTTP key today, Bing's own results, or one vendor's storage terms.

How we compared

Criteria: raw results or generated answer, own index or scraping, price per 1,000 requests, caching and AI-use terms, MCP. Sources are each vendor's own pages, checked 20 October 2026. Quality figures come from the Artificial Analysis Search Index (data page dated 19 October 2026; one answer model for every provider; rows measured on different dates, shown above) and from the benchmark at /benchmarks, which Grounder ran. Its method, in the site's words: "From 8 to 13 October 2026, each question was searched once on every provider's default search, taking its top 10 results within 60 seconds. Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, at high reasoning effort, answered each question from those results alone, with the same prompt every time, and graded each answer against the benchmark's reference answer with OpenAI's SimpleQA grader." For a wider comparison, see the best search API for AI agents. To move field by field to Brave, Tavily, Exa or Perplexity, see the mapping table in migrating from the Brave Search API.

FAQ

Is the Bing Search API still available?

No. Microsoft's notice set retirement for 11 August 2025, decommissioning existing instances completely and ending new sign-ups. The Register reported on 15 May 2025 that DuckDuckGo and other long-standing customers "will reportedly not be immediately affected"; we found no Microsoft page confirming any continuing access.

What does Microsoft recommend instead, and can I still get raw Bing results?

Grounding with Bing Search in Foundry Agent Service: a cited model answer, not raw results, at $14 per 1,000 transactions (Microsoft, checked 20 October 2026; some 2025 articles quote $35). Web IQ returns ranked passages from the Bing index under Microsoft's caching rules, and SerpApi returns scraped Bing results as JSON.

Which Bing API alternatives return raw results for AI agents?

Brave Search API, Exa, Perplexity Search API, Parallel and Tavily return result lists rather than a generated answer by default. Mojeek, which runs its own crawler, does too, at £2 (Startup) or £3 (Business) per 1,000 requests excluding VAT.

How do I migrate from the Bing Search API?

Map your query, count, language or market and freshness settings to the new provider's fields, return one internal result shape of title, URL and snippet, and run old and new side by side on real queries. Brave takes q, country, search_lang, count and freshness; Tavily takes query, max_results, time_range, country and language; Perplexity takes query, max_results, country and search_domain_filter.

Which Bing alternatives offer licensed content?

Grounder marks every result as licensed or not and, for signed-up accounts, keeps only licensed results by default. Microsoft says Web IQ brings together the open web, licensed content and structured data. Terms differ by provider, so read each one.

Next step

Your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day. No card needed. Connect an MCP client to https://api.grounder.net/mcp and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple; the steps are in Docs.