TL;DR
- The public Bing Search APIs (Web, Image, News, Video, Custom) were retired on August 11, 2025. Old keys return nothing.
- Microsoft's replacement, Grounding with Bing, only works inside Azure AI agents and never gives you raw results.
- Closest drop-in for raw JSON: Brave Search API ($5 per 1,000, own index). For Google results: Serper.
- If an LLM reads the results, go straight to Exa, Parallel, Tavily or Keirolabs and delete your scraper.
For about fifteen years, if you needed web search inside your product, there was really only one door to knock on. Google never sold its results. Yahoo licensed someone else’s. So you signed up for Azure, got a BING_SEARCH_V7_SUBSCRIPTION_KEY, and moved on with your life.
Then Microsoft closed the door. The Bing Search APIs were retired on August 11, 2025, after roughly three months’ notice, and a surprising amount of the internet’s plumbing went quiet. Rank trackers, research tools, chatbots, internal search bars, half the “AI agent” demos on GitHub: all calling an endpoint that now returns nothing.
If you’re reading this with a dead key in your .env, here’s the good news: you have more and better options than in 2024. Here’s what they are, and how to get off Bing in an afternoon.
What exactly was switched off?
Microsoft’s documentation now carries one short sentence: “Public Bing Search and Bing Custom Search APIs were retired on 11th August 2025.” The old docs live on under “previous versions”, for reference only.
That covers everything you’re likely to have used:
- Bing Web Search v7, the one with ten blue links as JSON
- Bing Image, News and Video Search
- Bing Custom Search, for searching a fixed list of sites
- Bing Autosuggest, Spell Check and Entity Search
There’s no grace mode or read-only tier. If your code still calls api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search, it’s calling into the void.
What is Grounding with Bing, and why isn’t it a replacement?
Microsoft’s official answer is Grounding with Bing Search. On paper it sounds like a successor. In practice it’s a different product for a different job.
You never see the results. Microsoft’s own docs say developers and end users “don’t have access to raw content returned from Grounding with Bing Search.” You get the model’s answer, plus citations you’re required to display in the exact form Microsoft specifies.
The rest of the fine print:
- It’s a tool for Azure AI agents in Microsoft Foundry. The agent decides when to search, not you.
- Only paid Azure subscriptions qualify. Free-credit and sponsored subscriptions can’t deploy it.
- Your queries leave the Azure compliance boundary and fall under separate Grounding with Bing terms.
- The classic agents version is deprecated and retires March 31, 2027. Microsoft now points new projects to a Web Search tool in the Foundry Agents Service.
So if Bing was filling a results page, powering an SEO tool, feeding your own ranking model, or giving a non-Azure LLM some context, Grounding with Bing can’t do that job.
Microsoft didn’t replace the Bing API. It replaced the reason most new customers wanted it.
The replacements, by what Bing was doing for you
The right replacement depends entirely on who was reading the results.
| What you used Bing for | Replace it with | Per 1,000 | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web results as JSON, non-Google | Brave Search API | $5 | Own independent index; closest like-for-like |
| Google-quality results as JSON | Serper | $0.30–1.00 | Cheapest Google SERP (full pricing) |
| Bing’s own results, specifically | SerpApi with engine=bing | $25 entry | Scrapes Bing and parses it the way v7 did |
| Results for an LLM, with page text | Exa, Tavily, Parallel | $1–8 | They fetch and clean pages, so your scraper goes away |
| Cheapest at volume | Keirolabs lite | $0.03–0.10 | Own index, lowest list price we track |
| Image search | Brave images, Serper /images | $1–5 | Both have image endpoints |
| News search | Brave news, Serper /news | $1–5 | Both have news endpoints |
Prices are list prices checked November 2, 2026. The calculator shows every mode at your volume.
People read the results
Brave Search API
Own index, no Google or Bing underneath, and a request shape almost identical to v7. The least surprising swap.
You want Google’s results
Serper
$1.00 per 1,000 on the small pack, $0.30 at volume. What Bing users often secretly wanted all along.
An LLM reads the results
Exa or Parallel
Page text or ranked excerpts come back in the same call. If you were scraping every Bing result yourself, this deletes a service.
Cost is the whole story
Keirolabs lite
$0.10 per 1,000 on Essential, $0.03 on Startup. Its own index, with a Google SERP endpoint on the same key if you need it.
Migrating Bing Web Search v7 code
Here’s the call you probably have somewhere:
curl -G "https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search" \
--data-urlencode "q=latest rust release" \
-d count=10 -d mkt=en-US \
-H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: $BING_KEY"And here’s the same request on Brave. Look how little changes:
curl -G "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search" \
--data-urlencode "q=latest rust release" \
-d count=10 -d country=US -d search_lang=en \
-H "X-Subscription-Token: $BRAVE_KEY"The parameter map
| Bing v7 | Brave | Serper |
|---|---|---|
q | q | q |
count | count | num |
offset | offset | page |
mkt=en-US | country=US + search_lang=en | gl=us + hl=en |
freshness=Day/Week/Month | freshness=pd/pw/pm | tbs=qdr:d/w/m |
responseFilter=News | /res/v1/news/search | /news endpoint |
webPages.value[].url | web.results[].url | organic[].link |
webPages.value[].snippet | web.results[].description | organic[].snippet |
Don’t just swap the URL. Wrap search in one function that returns your shape (title, url, snippet), and map each provider’s JSON inside it. The next time a search API disappears (and Google’s Custom Search is next, on January 1, 2027), you change one file.
Migrating image and news search
Bing Image Search users have two easy paths: Brave’s image endpoint, or Serper’s /images. Both return URLs, thumbnails and source pages. For news, Brave’s /res/v1/news/search and Serper’s /news cover the same ground. Freshness filters work on both.
What happened to Bing Custom Search?
It went down on the same day. If you used it to search a fixed list of sites, the nearest options are:
- A SERP API with
site:operators. Works anywhere, but some providers charge extra for operators (DataForSEO bills each at 5× the base price). - Vertex AI Search, Google’s tool for searching up to 50 domains.
- Your own index. If it’s your own sites, a small crawler plus a search library is often cheaper and faster than any API.
Don’t migrate to Google’s Custom Search JSON API. It’s closed to new customers and shuts down on January 1, 2027.
Is there a free replacement for the Bing Search API?
Not one you should put in production. The most useful free allowances right now:
- Parallel: 5,000 requests a month
- Tavily: 1,000 credits a month, no card
- Brave: $5 of credits every month, about 1,000 searches (card required)
- Serper: 2,500 queries once, at signup
- Keirolabs: 750 credits once
And no, DuckDuckGo doesn’t secretly have one. It really doesn’t.
The lesson Bing taught everyone
Search APIs are infrastructure you rent from someone with other priorities.
Microsoft didn’t kill the Bing API because it was failing. It killed it because selling raw results stopped fitting its strategy. That can happen to any provider, which is why the boring advice is the important advice:
- Abstract the provider. One function, your own result shape.
- Log your queries. A week of real queries is the best benchmark you’ll ever own.
- Keep a second provider warm. Replay your logged queries against it every month. When the next shutdown email arrives, you’re already done.
If an LLM is the reader, start with the best web search APIs. If people are, start with Brave or Serper. Either way, you’ll probably end up with something better than v7 ever was.
FAQ
Is the Bing Search API still available?
No. All public Bing Search APIs were retired on August 11, 2025.
Can I still get Bing results through an API?
Yes, indirectly: SerpApi’s engine=bing scrapes and parses Bing results. Within Azure AI agents, Grounding with Bing uses Bing too, but returns answers rather than results.
What’s the cheapest Bing Search API alternative?
Keirolabs lite at $0.10 per 1,000 ($0.03 on its Startup plan). For Google results, Serper at $0.30–1.00. Compare everything in the price calculator.