Bing Web Search API Is Gone: What to Use in 2026

If you're reading this because a Bing Search API call in your codebase started failing, here's the short version: it's not coming back. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025. Existing keys stopped working that day, and there's no way to sign up for a new one — the product page is gone.

This catches people out for a specific reason: the retirement is over a year old now, but Bing Web Search is still the example in a lot of tutorials, Stack Overflow answers, and half-finished side projects. If you're picking it up now, you're not late — you just hit a wall nobody updated the docs for.

What Microsoft actually said#

From Microsoft's own lifecycle announcement, published May 15, 2025:

"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."

The affected products are the Bing Web, Image, News, Video, Visual, Entity, Spell Check, Autosuggest and Custom Search APIs — the whole family, not just web search. Microsoft's stated replacement is Grounding with Bing Search, a tool inside Azure AI Agents rather than a standalone API. That's a real difference: instead of an API key and an HTTP call, you're now provisioning an Azure AI Foundry project and building an agent around it. For a team that just wanted "search results as JSON," that's a heavier lift than the thing it replaced.

What to actually check before you pick a replacement#

Not every "Bing alternative" solves the same problem. Before you evaluate options, be clear about which one you had:

1. Raw SERP data — rankings, ad slots, related searches, the page as Bing (or Google) actually renders it. If that's what you built on, you want a SERP API (SerpAPI and similar), not a synthesis layer.
2. Search results feeding an LLM or agent — you were calling Bing, then writing code to turn webPages.value[] into something a model could read. This is the common case, and it's the one worth rethinking rather than replacing 1:1.
3. News or freshness monitoring — the Bing News API specifically; a general web-search replacement may not be the right shape for this.

If you're in bucket 2 — search results that exist to feed a model — the honest fix usually isn't "find another JSON-of-links API and re-write the same parsing code." It's cutting that step out: a retrieval API that returns a synthesized answer with citations already attached, instead of a results page you assemble into one yourself.

That's the case ODEN makes for itself, and it's worth being specific about where it fits and where it doesn't — see ODEN vs Bing Search API for the direct comparison, including a before/after of what the migration looks like in code. If you specifically need SERP structure (rankings, ad data), that page also points you to the tools that are the closer match instead.

Wiring a replacement into what you already have#

Whatever you pick, the integration point is usually the same: your LLM or agent's tool-calling loop. See answers and citations for how a search call's response maps onto a prompt, and OpenAI function calling if that's the framework your agent runs on — the pattern is the same one Bing Web Search served, just with a synthesized answer replacing the results page you used to parse yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions#

When exactly did the Bing Search API shut down?#

August 11, 2025. Microsoft announced the retirement on May 15, 2025, giving existing users about three months' notice before keys stopped working.

Is there a direct, like-for-like replacement from Microsoft?#

Not as a standalone API. Microsoft's recommended path is Grounding with Bing Search inside Azure AI Agents, which means setting up an Azure AI Foundry project and an agent rather than swapping an API key.

Do I need a search API at all, or can I just re-implement scraping?#

You can, but it's brittle — page layouts change, and you inherit rate limiting and blocking as an ongoing maintenance cost. A search API exists specifically to absorb that churn for you.