Microsoft recently officially launched a new "grounding API" service called Web IQ. This is a search and information access suite designed for AI agents (AI-agents) and natively oriented to the AI era. It is supported by Bing's search indexing and understanding capabilities. Microsoft said that Web IQ can connect AI systems and various intelligent agents with the latest real-world information from the entire network, covering various content forms such as web pages, news, pictures, and videos.
According to Microsoft, Web IQ uses the same API infrastructure as Microsoft Copilot and many mainstream AI systems (including ChatGPT), but it is not the old interface used in the early days to provide networking capabilities for these large models, but a new generation system reconstructed "from the bottom up." Jordi Ribas, president of Microsoft's Search and AI Group, said that the API has been redesigned and optimized in terms of efficiency, speed, and result relevance. Currently, Web IQ has been used to generate the top Copilot answers in Bing search results. It has also been adopted by ChatGPT to support some online answers and directly serves the Q&A scenario within Copilot.
Unlike traditional search for human users, Web IQ is positioned as "search designed for agents, not people." Ribas explained to Search Engine Land that when humans search, sorting is often the primary consideration, but for AI agents, the importance of sorting is relatively low. What is more critical is whether the appropriate information can be extracted from the document and reorganized and delivered quickly. AI agents will not just issue a query and end like many human users, but will continue to explore downwards and fan-out retrieval, and continue to ask questions and invoke searches around the task, thus placing completely different requirements on the underlying retrieval and attribution systems.
Microsoft said that this "agent-like search behavior" prompted the team to re-architect the entire system, from indexing and retrieval to sorting, paragraph selection and overall arrangement, and each layer was adjusted around the needs of "inference-time grounding". Due to the high frequency of AI agent search calls and long links, Web IQ is designed to be as efficient as possible, reducing the token consumption of large models while ensuring the quality of results, and achieving "fewer input tokens, better output answers, and lower calling costs." In terms of speed, Microsoft says Web IQ is approximately 2.5 times faster than the "next best alternatives" currently on the market.
In terms of access and usability, Web IQ is currently used by Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and other large large model platforms. Microsoft plans to gradually open access to more developers and partners as the system further expands and matures. For organizations and developers interested in trying out or integrating Web IQ, Microsoft recommends submitting requirements and interest information through its official website.
For the search and marketing industries, Microsoft's move is seen as an important bet on the "agent web" trend. As more AI agents begin to interact directly with web content, website architecture, content annotation, and technical optimization methods are likely to change to better support these types of machine access and understanding scenarios. Search Engine Land believes that although human users will not "disappear" as a result, AI agents are rapidly arriving or even on the way. Website owners and practitioners need to prepare for this round of network evolution as soon as possible so that their sites can be upgraded and adapted simultaneously.