Rather than providing standard search links, this new service from Microsoft returns structured evidence objects and relevant passages to AI apps.
Large language models do not inherently have access to information published after their training cutoff. As a result, AI assistants and agents powered by these models need access to current web information to deliver up-to-date responses. Microsoft already offers Grounding with Bing Search, which allows agents to incorporate real-time public web data when generating answers.
At Build 2026, Microsoft announced Web IQ, a new suite of AI-native grounding APIs designed for AI applications and autonomous agents. With Web IQ, AI applications can ground their responses using information from web pages, news, images, and videos.
As expected, Web IQ is built on Bing’s global index. However, to make it suitable for AI apps and agents, Microsoft re-architected the stack. Instead of returning simple web search links, Web IQ provides relevant passages and structured evidence objects. This reduces the amount of unnecessary context sent to an AI model, lowering token usage while improving the quality of grounded responses.
Knut Risvik, Distinguished Engineer of Search & AI at Microsoft, mentioned in the announcement blog post that Web IQ was redesigned across indexing, retrieval, ranking, passage selection, and orchestration. It uses Microsoft’s Harrier embedding models and technology derived from DiskANN, its large-scale nearest-neighbor search system.
In Microsoft’s own internal tests, Web IQ delivered sub-165ms p95 latency across five data center regions. This is nearly 2.5 times faster than the next-best alternative under comparable configurations. Microsoft also noted that Web IQ delivers on quality and speed using significantly fewer tokens than its alternatives. However, the company did not name the competing services in its announcement.
Additionally, Microsoft stated that Web IQ inherits Bing’s publisher and web ecosystem policies, including support for robots exclusion protocols, publisher controls, and content access preferences.
Web IQ is not yet generally available to everyone, but interested developers and organizations can register for it here. Since Web IQ is purpose-built for AI agents and multi-step workflows, Grounding with Bing will remain available for existing customers as an accessible entry point for traditional search experiences.
