Microsoft Plays Dirty
Microsoft's Bing Web Search API Shutdown and the Critical Role of Search in AI
While everyone was waiting for GPT-5 and indulging in the AGI fantasies of tech enthusiasts, Microsoft quietly disrupted numerous companies and products.
A few months ago, without warning, Microsoft discontinued support for the Bing Search API and on the 11th of August, 2025 it switched it off entirely.
You might ask, "Isn't Bing just a worse Google search?" Far from it. The Bing Web Search API is much more than that - it’s a critical tool that many products and companies rely on to search the web.
It powers numerous platforms, including Perplexity, DuckDuckGo, and at one point, ChatGPT, among others. Nearly every Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) bot implemented on Azure with web access depended on the Bing Web Search API.
Then, suddenly - bam! - the API was gone. What's left? Grounding with Bing, a service in Microsoft’s AI Foundry that effectively halts do-it-yourself solutions and pushes developers toward using their ecosystem.
This demonstrates how easily reliance on a single provider can jeopardize your product. Let’s dive into why web search is so vital for large language models, what alternatives exist for the Bing Web Search API, and why Microsoft made this decision.
Content of the Newsletter:
The Great Drama of Bing Search API Shutdown
What happened and who the victims are (many many many casualties)
Alternatives to Bing Search API
An overview of alternatives with prices, query limits and quality comparison
Good Search Results Are the Key to Quality LLM Answers
Why search is so essential for LLMs that OpenAI made creation of their own search index a core strategic priority
Three Theories on the Intentions of Microsoft
Why would they switch off such a widely used API. Is Bing going to be shut down too?
The Great Drama of Bing Web Search API Shutdown
Microsoft, out of nowhere, pulls the plug on their Bing Web Search API. Boom! and just like that it's gone. Quietly, just an email to devs and a Azure post saying "ain’t no API no more"
And if you're thinking, "Big deal, it's just Bing, it sucks anyway". Nope.
Bing Search API was actually very useful. This thing was essential for tons of companies that were building their whole business on it and you heard of them.
So let’s look at the casualties:
Perplexity.AI: It's not like they had any moat even before. They used third-party models combined with the Bing Search API. Those were the two major components. Now one is gone. This is the biggest casualty. The Bing Search API was cheap. The alternatives that I will discuss later are expensive. My heart goes out to Perplexity. I thought it would just be killed by the competition. It got killed by Microsoft.
DuckDuckGo: They dodged the bullet. They're lucky to be one of Microsoft's largest customers and to have a locked-in deal. Yet, their ground is shaky. If my theories discussed later are correct, DuckDuckGo might have to quack its goodbye to us and actually go.
You.com: I love how they dealt with it. Respect to their CEO, Richard Socher. They did something incredibly complex - they built their own search index and are now offering it as an alternative to the Bing Search API and cashing out.
Ecosia: Another dramatic casualty as Perplexity.AI. Even more heartbreaking. It is a non-profit tree planting search engine that heavily relied on Bing Search. The website went down for some time but now is back up. They eventually partnered with Qwant to launch a new independent European search index called Staan (Search Trusted API Access Network). They seem to be quite optimistic about it and even published an article called:
The internet just got better: our European search index goes live
That’s why EUSP has developed Staan (Search Trusted API Access Network), a search index aimed to support a sovereign, privacy-first search infrastructure for Europe. It’s built for alternative search engines and AI companies that need fast, reliable access to the latest web data, while safeguarding user privacy and data security.
The search results are not fantastic but beggars can’t be choosers.
Qwant: That's the very search engine that Ecosia switched to. Qwant united with Ecosia in common misery. They both used to heavily rely on Bing. Ironically, that was the EU anti-Google fight weapon: building a search on the basis of Bing, what could go wrong here? Well, now they've finally decided to start building their own European index called Staan.
OpenAI: Even they got affected - their search services went down for a day. They hooked Bing Search Api into web browsing features ages ago, but Azure ties mean they keep access.
But OpenAI does not need this dependency from Microsoft, and they have already announced long ago that building their own index is at the core of their strategy. They planned to rely on their own index for 80% of queries by year-end.[source] It is possible that this is the index GPT-5 is optimized for, and they would have ditched Bing anyway by now. I will play a psychic and assume that they might soon offer this as an API—an index that is created for LLMs and not document retrieval! And for a reasonable price. If Microsoft continues like this, Musk might be right:
And the biggest casualty of them all: niche search engines, startups, and RAG developers
The shutdown greatly hurts the smaller entities that have no leverage:
PrivacyWall, Infospace, and Meta-Search Tools: These lesser-known engines and aggregators (e.g., Searx instances) relied on Bing Search API for affordable web access. Unless they find a cost friendly alternative - they will go extinct.
AI Startups and Indie Devs: Countless RAG bots, enterprise copilots, and knowledge graphs built on Azure lost their web access, it will cause rebuild costs and flexibility losses.
Become a paid subscriber to learn about alternatives to the Bing Search API, why web search is essential for LLMs, and what Microsoft aims to achieve with the sudden shutdown of this critical service.
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