Bing Search API Replacement for Bing Web Search API and Bing SERP API JSON
Microsoft switched the Bing Search APIs off on August 11, 2025. Send the same query, market and offset to WebScrap as a Bing search URL and get the live Bing results page back as JSON: position, title, URL, displayed link and snippet. No Azure resource, no language model in the loop, and a flat 0.33 to 0.98 USD per 1,000 results pages.
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This console sends a real request and shows you the real response. Five live fetches per session, and the sample targets run as often as you like.
The Bing Web Search API is gone, and its successor is a different product
Microsoft retired every Bing Search API on August 11, 2025, including Web, Image, News, Video and Custom Search, with about three months of notice. Its recommended successor, Grounding with Bing Search, returns a language model's answer with citations rather than a list of results. If your product needs the results themselves, the replacement is a SERP API that returns the Bing page as JSON.
A lot of software was quietly built on the old v7.0 endpoint because it was the cheapest official web search API on the market. Lead enrichment tools that look up a company's website from its name. Brand and reputation monitors. Content tools that pull the top results before writing a brief. Price comparison scripts. Internal research agents. Many of them read webPages.value, stored the rows and moved on.
Grounding with Bing does not give you those rows. Microsoft says developers and end users do not get the raw content it returns, and it requires you to show the cited website URLs and the Bing query link in your interface. That is fine for a chat assistant. It does not work for a product that stores, ranks, filters or reports on search results.
Your four options after the Bing Search API shutdown
Which one fits depends on what your code did with the response. Did a model read it, did a person see it, or did your database keep it?
| Option | Best for | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|
| Grounding with Bing Search | Azure AI Agents that need fresh web facts inside a chat answer, with citations handled for you | No raw result list, display rules for citations, 14 USD per 1,000 tool calls plus model tokens, and an Azure AI Foundry project to run it in |
| AI search APIs | Agents and retrieval pipelines that want page content summarized or extracted in one call | Their own index and ranking. If your customers expect what Bing shows, the order and the sources will differ |
| SERP API specialists | Bing and Google results as JSON with many verticals and ready made parsers | Priced per search in bundles. Entry plans of the best known vendor work out at 15 to 25 USD per 1,000 searches |
| WebScrap | The live Bing results page as JSON at a flat rate, plus Google and any other public page on the same key and plan | You name the fields you want instead of getting a fixed Bing schema. Entity, spell check and autosuggest have no page to read, so they are not covered |
What your old Bing Search API volume costs now
Microsoft's published Bing Search tiers ran from about 6 to 25 USD per 1,000 transactions, depending on the tier and which APIs it covered. Grounding with Bing Search lists 14 USD per 1,000 transactions, and one user question can trigger more than one. The table assumes one call for one page of about 10 results, and months of 30 days.
| Searches per month | Old Bing tiers | Grounding with Bing | WebScrap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30,000 | 180 to 750 USD | 420 USD plus model tokens | 49 USD, Starter (50,000 included) |
| 150,000 | 900 to 3,750 USD | 2,100 USD plus model tokens | 149 USD, Growth (250,000 included) |
| 1,000,000 | 6,000 USD and up | 14,000 USD plus model tokens | 499 USD, Scale (1,500,000 included) |
The honest caveat is the result count. The old API returned up to 50 web results in one transaction with count=50. The live Bing page shows about 10 organic results, so a 50 result pull becomes five requests. If most of your calls asked for 50, multiply your volume by five before you read the table. Even then, Scale at 1.5 million requests covers 300,000 fifty result searches a month for 499 USD.
The same plan also fetches the pages behind the results. Pulling the top three URLs for every query is three more requests at the same rate, and the AI web scraper returns the fields you name from each of them.
Migration map from Bing Web Search API v7 parameters
The old request went to api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search with an Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header. The new one is a POST to /v1/scrape with a Bing search URL and a plain English list of the fields you want, documented on the API docs page.
| Bing API v7 | What it did | On WebScrap |
|---|---|---|
Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key | Azure resource key | One WebScrap API key in the header. No Azure subscription or resource group |
q | The search terms | q in the Bing URL, any phrase including Bing operators such as site: and filetype: |
count and offset | Up to 50 results, then an offset | first in the URL (1, 11, 21), about 10 results per request |
mkt and cc | Market and country | cc and mkt in the URL, plus the country parameter so the search really comes from there, with an optional US city |
setLang | Interface language | setlang in the URL |
freshness | Day, week or month filter | Bing's own time filter in the URL, the same one a searcher picks under Any time |
/v7.0/images/search | Image results | The Bing Images URL for the query, asking for image URL, thumbnail, title, source page and size |
/v7.0/news/search | News results | The Bing News URL for the query, asking for headline, source, time and link |
webPages.value[] | name, url, displayUrl, snippet | Organic results with position, title, URL, displayed link and snippet, typed as you described them, plus ads when you ask |
Two fields have no equivalent on the page: dateLastCrawled and the id values used to rank mixed answers. If your code sorted on crawl date, sort on the date shown in the snippet where Bing prints one, or fetch the result URL and read its published date. If you only ever needed Google, the SERP API page covers the same flow for google.com.
How to replace the Bing Search API in four steps
01
Find the dead calls
Search code, cron jobs and low code tools for api.bing.microsoft.com and the subscription key header. Retired endpoints fail quietly in old scripts, and empty results can look like "nothing found".
02
Wrap one function
Put a small client in front of search that turns q, mkt and offset into a Bing URL and maps the JSON back to the shape your code already reads. Callers do not change.
03
Check a sample
Run 200 of your real queries and compare them with what Bing shows in a browser from the same country. The live page is what searchers actually see, including local results.
04
Set a usage alert
Turn on an alert on the new plan so a runaway loop cannot surprise you, then delete the old Azure resource and its key from config.
Who is replacing the Bing Web Search API and why they pay
SaaS with search inside
Lead enrichment and research tools whose customers type a company or a topic and expect web results back. The feature is part of what customers pay for, so a model summary is not a substitute.
AI agents outside Azure
Teams running their own models or another cloud who used Bing as the search tool. A plain JSON result list plugs into any agent framework without moving to Azure AI Foundry.
SEO agencies tracking Bing
Bing positions by market for clients whose buyers use Edge and Windows search. The rank tracking API page has the cost per keyword arithmetic.
Monitoring and compliance
Brand, reputation and adverse media checks that search a name plus risk terms. Pair Bing with Google News results for recent coverage from both engines.
Three mistakes teams make when they replace the Bing API
Moving to another API with an end date. Several lists of Bing alternatives still recommend the Google Custom Search JSON API. It is closed to new customers and shuts down on January 1, 2027, so a team that migrates there will migrate twice. Our Custom Search replacement page covers that deadline.
Scraping Bing from one server. It works for an afternoon. Then the same address sends a few thousand searches, starts getting challenges, and eventually returns a page that parses fine but holds no results. Your code reads that as zero matches. A managed API rotates the exit address through a proxy pool and treats an empty page on a common query as a failed fetch, which is never billed.
Ignoring the market. The old API used mkt to pick a market even when the call came from a US data center. A live page depends on where the search comes from as well. Set cc in the URL and the country on the request, or en-US results will drift depending on which region your job ran in.
Bing Search API questions
Is the Bing Search API still available?
No. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025. Existing instances were decommissioned and new signups closed. That covered the Web, Image, News, Video and Custom Search endpoints, among others. Calls to the old v7.0 endpoints no longer return results.
What replaced the Bing Search API?
Microsoft points customers to Grounding with Bing Search inside Azure AI Agents. It is a tool a language model calls, and it returns a model written answer with citations, not the raw list of results. If your code read webPages.value, a SERP API that returns the live Bing results page as JSON is the closer replacement.
How much does the Bing Search API cost now?
The old API is gone, so there is no price to pay for it. Grounding with Bing Search lists 14 USD per 1,000 transactions plus the model tokens of the agent that calls it. On WebScrap one Bing results page is one request at 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter, 0.60 on Growth and 0.33 on Scale.
Can I still get a Bing Search API key?
No. Azure no longer creates Bing Search v7 resources, and keys from before August 11, 2025 stopped working when the instances were decommissioned. A WebScrap key is issued when you create an account and covers Bing, Google and any other public page on the same plan.
Does Grounding with Bing return search results I can store?
Not in the old sense. Microsoft states that developers and end users do not get the raw content returned by Grounding with Bing Search, and it requires you to display the website URLs and the Bing query link it cites. That suits a chat assistant, not a product that stores, ranks or reports on results.
How do I get Bing search results as JSON?
Send a Bing search URL such as bing.com/search?q=your+query&cc=US to the WebScrap scrape endpoint and describe the fields you want: position, title, URL, displayed link and snippet. You get back the live results page as typed JSON, fetched from the country you set, with failed fetches never billed.
Is there a Bing Image Search API replacement?
Yes, the same way. Send the Bing Images results URL for your query and ask for the image URL, thumbnail, title, source page and dimensions. Each results page is one request at the same flat rate. For Bing News, send the Bing News search URL and ask for headline, source, time and link.
What happened to the count and offset parameters?
The old API returned up to 50 web results per call through count and offset. The live Bing page shows about 10 organic results per page and pages through first=1, 11, 21 and so on. A call that asked for 50 results becomes five requests, which is worth budgeting before you migrate.
Should I switch to a Google search API instead of Bing?
Only if your users care about Google's order. Many teams picked Bing because its API was cheap, not because they needed Bing's ranking. If that is you, the same key returns Google results too. Avoid moving to the Google Custom Search JSON API, which is closed to new customers and shuts down January 1, 2027.
Is it legal to use a SERP API instead of the official Bing API?
Fetching public search results pages is widely done and SERP APIs are an established product category, but terms of service and your use of the data are your responsibility. Store results for analysis rather than republishing them wholesale, respect copyright in snippets, and get legal advice for resale products.
Get Bing results back into your product
Send a Bing search URL and the fields you want, get the live results page as JSON. Flat 0.98 USD per 1,000 requests, falling to 0.33 on Scale, no Azure subscription, failed fetches never billed.