Bing Search API Retired: Alternatives for Apps and LLMs
Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 2025-08-11. Compare the replacements for apps and LLM agents: Brave, Tavily, Exa, SERP APIs and built-in model search.
Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 2025-08-11 and stopped taking new customers. Code that called api.bing.microsoft.com for web results needs a replacement, and the options today split into four groups.
Pick by what you need
| You need | Look at | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A non-Google web index, raw results | Brave Search API | Runs its own index; official MCP server. In 2026 its free tier changed to a monthly credit. |
| Results to feed an LLM | Tavily, Exa, Parallel, Perplexity Search API | Ranked results with LLM-ready text. Tavily was acquired by Nebius in February 2026. |
| The exact Google results page | SerpAPI, Serper | Structured copies of Google pages; a different product from an index. |
| Search inside a chat/agent product | Model-native tools, or an API gateway option | Convenient, but tied to the provider or gateway. |
Migration checklist
- Inventory what you use. Web results only, or also images, news, autosuggest, entity search? Most replacements cover web and news; coverage of the rest varies.
- Map the response. Bing returned
webPages.value[]withname,url,snippet. Write one adapter that outputs your own{title, url, snippet}shape and keep the rest of your code unaware of the vendor. - Map the filters. Market/
mkt, freshness and safe search each have a differently named equivalent. Check each one rather than assuming. - Check limits and billing. Per-request price, rate limits, free tier, and whether results may be stored or shown to end users.
- Test with your real queries and compare results side by side before switching traffic.
If the reason you used Bing was to give a model fresh information
You may not need a search API integration at all. On BazaarLink you add :online to the model name and the request is searched first, then answered with citations:
curl https://bazaarlink.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BAZAARLINK_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"openai/gpt-6-luna:online","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Latest news on the Bing Search API retirement"}]}'
Filters such as country, language, topic and time range go in the same request, and you are billed per search; failed searches are not charged. Details: adding web search with :online.
Keep it replaceable
The Bing shutdown is the second time in a few years a search product disappeared from under developers. Whatever you choose, isolate it behind one function, log which vendor served each result, and keep a tested fallback.
For the four tools and pricing, see Tavily-style AI search API: Search, Extract, Crawl & Map.
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