Microsoft took the wraps off a new service called Web IQ today at its annual Build developer conference, giving AI agents access to the live web through Bing’s powerful search index. The move aims to solve a persistent challenge in agentic AI workflows: outdated or hallucinated information that undermines trust.

Announced during the Day 1 keynote on June 2, 2026, Web IQ is positioned as a grounding layer that fetches factual, real-time data from across the internet—web pages, news articles, images, and even video evidence—and delivers it to AI agents via a set of REST APIs. Developers can integrate it into autonomous agents running on Microsoft’s own Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, or any third‑party platform that speaks HTTP.

“Grounding has always been the missing piece that made agents clever but not reliable,” said John Montgomery, Corporate Vice President of AI Platform at Microsoft, in an interview backstage. “Web IQ connects every agent to the open web with the same precision and freshness that powers Bing Search. It transforms agents from confident fabulists into accurate, citing research assistants.”

Why Grounding Matters More Than Ever

AI agents have evolved from simple chatbots into autonomous programs that book meetings, draft code, and compile research reports. But their large language models (LLMs) are frozen in time—trained on data that often ends months or years ago. Without a way to fetch live information, agents invent facts, misinterpret recent events, or rely on outdated documentation, a phenomenon commonly known as hallucination.

Traditional Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) workflows tether LLMs to internal knowledge bases or vector databases, but those repositories are static and limited. Web IQ bridges the gap to the dynamic web, allowing agents to pull in breaking news, updated product specs, live market data, or the latest academic papers.

“We’ve seen enterprises build incredible internal RAG solutions,” Montgomery explained. “But the moment an agent needs to answer ‘What’s the current Microsoft stock price?’ or ‘Show me today’s weather in Seattle,’ internal data falls apart. Web IQ is that external memory layer.”

Inside Web IQ: The APIs That Power It

Web IQ is not a single API but a family of endpoints optimized for different content types. During the Build session “Unlocking agentic grounding with Bing Web IQ,” product manager Sarah Lin demoed four primary offerings:

  • Web Page Grounding: Accepts a natural‑language query and returns the top‑10 web page snippets, full‑text content when available, and structured metadata including publish dates, author credibility scores, and canonical URLs.
  • News Grounding: Taps Bing’s news index to surface articles from thousands of licensed publishers. Each result includes a headline, a 300‑word summary, and a confidence score reflecting editorial trustworthiness.
  • Image Grounding: Fetches up to 20 images per query, complete with alt‑text, contextual captions, and verified source attribution. Designed for agents that need to illustrate reports or verify visual claims.
  • Video Evidence: Returns short video clips with timestamps and transcripts. Lin showed how a legal‑research agent used this to pull exact deposition excerpts from public court recordings.

All endpoints share a common authentication model via Microsoft Entra ID and return results in a consistent JSON schema, making it straightforward for agents to parse and cite sources. Importantly, every response includes a citation_url field so agents can provide transparent references to end users.

“Citations aren’t an afterthought—they’re a first‑class design principle,” Lin emphasized. “When an agent says ‘Microsoft’s earnings rose 12%,’ it should show you exactly where that number came from.”

Early Use Cases: From Research to Customer Support

On stage, Lin walked through several scenarios that demonstrate Web IQ’s versatility.

Research agents: A marketing analyst asks, “Create a competitive landscape brief for robotic vacuum cleaners in Q1 2026.” The agent uses Web IQ’s web page grounding to pull product‑review sites, news grounding to gather recent press releases, and image grounding to download product photos—all in under three seconds. The resulting report includes a table of rivals, pricing charts, and proper footnotes.

Customer support copilots: A troubleshooting agent for a smart‑home company receives a customer question: “My thermostat won’t connect after the latest firmware update.” The agent calls Web IQ news grounding to check for recent outage reports, web page grounding to find updated install guides from the manufacturer’s support site, and video evidence to locate a technician’s walkthrough—all before formulating a response.

Legal and compliance: A law‑firm agent needs to verify a claim about a 2024 EU regulation. It queries Web IQ for the official EUR‑Lex page, retrieves the regulation text via web page grounding, and cross‑references recent news articles for interpretations—citing every source.

Microsoft also highlighted its internal usage. The Bing team itself uses Web IQ to help its customer‑support copilot stay up‑to‑date with changes to Bing Webmaster Tools, reducing the need for manual knowledge‑base updates.

Developer Experience and Integration

Web IQ arrives as a managed service within the Azure ecosystem, but Microsoft deliberately kept the integration surface minimal to maximize adoption. Developers can call the APIs directly from any code base, with SDKs available for Python, JavaScript, C#, and Java at launch. A no‑code connector for Copilot Studio lets low‑code developers add grounding actions to their agents by dragging and dropping a “Search the Web” node.

Pricing is consumption‑based, with a free tier that includes 1,000 grounding calls per month. Paid tiers scale with usage and offer higher rate limits, lower latency guarantees, and access to premium data sources like licensed financial feeds. Microsoft did not disclose exact per‑call costs but said it would be “competitive with existing search API pricing” and would offer volume discounts for enterprise agreements.

“We’re treating Web IQ as platform infrastructure, not a profit center,” said Montgomery. “It’s in our interest to make every agent more accurate, because that makes the whole AI ecosystem more trusted.”

Quotas can be monitored through Azure Monitor, and Microsoft plans to roll out a Grounding Quality Dashboard that tracks hallucination rates, citation accuracy, and user feedback for agents using Web IQ—a feature expected by late 2026.

How Web IQ Fits into Microsoft’s AI Stack

Web IQ isn’t a standalone product; it’s a new gear in Microsoft’s growing AI machinery. The company has been stitching together a comprehensive “agent fabric” that includes:

  • Copilot Studio: For building low‑code autonomous agents.
  • Azure AI Foundry: For enterprise‑grade agent orchestration, model fine‑tuning, and RAG pipelines.
  • Microsoft Fabric: Unified data analytics that agents can already query.
  • Microsoft 365 Agents: Purpose‑built agents embedded in Teams, Outlook, and Office apps.

Web IQ plugs directly into Foundry as a pre‑built “grounding skill,” and Microsoft has already updated the Copilot Studio template gallery to include a “Web‑Grounded Research Agent” blueprint. This deep integration means that an agent built in Copilot Studio can automatically invoke Web IQ when it detects a knowledge gap—no custom code required.

“We’ve lowered the barrier so much that a business analyst with zero AI experience can build a research agent that cites the live web,” Lin said.

The Competitive Landscape: Search as the Differentiator

Microsoft is not alone in recognizing the need for web grounding. Google offers its own Grounding with Google Search API for Generative AI on Vertex AI, while startups like Perplexity and You.com have built entire business models around AI‑powered search. OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses Bing (or a browser tool) when plugins are enabled, but those integrations are often opaque and hard for third‑party developers to control.

Web IQ’s key advantage is its direct pipeline to Bing’s index, which Microsoft claims is the second‑largest web corpus after Google. Moreover, Bing’s 15‑year investment in ranking algorithms, freshness detection, and entity understanding gives Web IQ high‑quality results out of the box. Developers don’t need to fine‑tune retrieval models or manage crawl infrastructure.

“Google’s Vertex AI grounding is powerful but tightly coupled to Google’s cloud,” said Forrester analyst Julie Ask. “Microsoft’s API‑first approach with Web IQ might appeal to shops that want to remain cloud‑agnostic or already live in Azure but don’t want to build their own search layer.”

Another differentiator is video evidence. Neither Google nor OpenAI offers a comparable video‑clip retrieval API specifically designed for agentic grounding. Microsoft is betting that as agents become more multimodal—processing not just text but images, audio, and video—developers will need a single service that can provide evidential data in any medium.

Responsible AI and Transparency

Grounding services implicitly raise questions about misinformation, bias, and copyright. Microsoft says Web IQ adheres to its existing Responsible AI Standard and includes several safeguards:

  • Provenance tracking: Every result carries a source_type field (e.g., “news,” “official_document,” “user_generated”) and a credibility score derived from Bing’s reputation models.
  • Content warnings: If a query returns content from a known low‑credibility domain, the API includes a warning flag and advises the agent to treat the information with caution.
  • Opt‑out for publishers: Websites can block Web IQ from indexing their content using the same NOARCHIVE tags that already work for Bing crawling.
  • Citation enforcement: Agents built with Copilot Studio can optionally enforce automatic inline citations, so users can always inspect sources.

During the Q&A session, a developer asked about potential “grounding loops” where an agent repeatedly calls external search and consumes excessive costs. Lin confirmed that Web IQ supports caching headers and deduplication tokens, and Copilot Studio will include a “conciseness” setting to limit the number of grounding calls per task.

What’s Next for Web IQ

Web IQ launches in public preview today in the Azure East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia regions. A general‑availability date hasn’t been set, but Montgomery hinted it could arrive before the end of 2026, alongside a planned integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot that would let business users ground responses directly from within Word, Excel, and Teams.

Also on the roadmap:

  • Multimodal grounding: Endpoints that can ingest an image or video and return related web content—useful for reverse image searches or verifying visual evidence.
  • Enterprise data blending: A mode that first searches a company’s Microsoft 365 tenant (SharePoint, OneDrive) and then falls back to the public web, all via a single Web IQ call.
  • Custom indexing: Allowing organizations to upload proprietary document collections and have Web IQ combine internal and external search results intelligently.

Microsoft is also exploring a “streaming grounding” protocol where agents can receive real‑time updates when a grounded topic changes—imagine a supply‑chain agent that gets a push notification when a supplier’s news page updates—but that feature is still in early research.

A New Era for Agent Reliability

Analysts see Web IQ as a natural but necessary step toward production‑grade AI agents. “2025 was the year enterprises experimented with agents. 2026 will be the year they demand reliability,” said Ask. “Microsoft is giving developers the tools to meet that bar, and grounding is the first brick.”

For developers who have struggled to keep agents honest, Web IQ offers a turnkey solution that leverages Bing’s decades of search expertise. The APIs are simple, the integration is deep, and the pricing model is familiar. If Microsoft can deliver on its promise of transparent, citable, and fresh data, agents might finally earn their seat at the enterprise table.

As the Build keynote wrapped, Montgomery left the audience with a one‑liner that summed up the ambition: “With Web IQ, every agent gets a library card for the whole internet—and the librarian is Bing.”