---
title: "Bing Search API alternatives after the shutdown (2026)"
category: "comparisons"
url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blog/bing-search-api-alternatives
---

## The 60-second version

Microsoft retired the Bing Search API on August 11, 2025. Existing instances were decommissioned completely and new signups closed ([Microsoft's retirement notice](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/bing-search-api-retirement)). There is no Bing search API on Microsoft's price list today, at any price.

- **Microsoft's official replacement, Grounding with Bing Search, is a different product.** It costs $14 per 1,000 transactions, runs only inside Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Search, and returns a model's grounded answer with citations, not a list of results you can parse.
- **If you need web results for an AI app,** the closest drop-in replacements are independent-index APIs: Brave ($5 per 1,000), Parallel ($1 per 1,000 in fast modes), Keirolabs (from $0.25 per 1,000) and Exa ($7 per 1,000).
- **If you need Bing's own result page** (positions, snippets, SERP features), use a SERP API that queries Bing, such as DataForSEO at $0.60 per 1,000 or SerpAPI.

**The first question to answer is what your app actually used Bing for: results to feed a model, or rankings to report.** Those two needs have different replacements, and picking the wrong kind is the most common migration mistake.

## Why did Microsoft shut down the Bing Search API?

**Microsoft announced the retirement on May 15, 2025, about 90 days ahead, and shut down the v7 Bing Web Search and Bing Custom Search APIs on August 11, 2025, across every free and paid tier.** In Microsoft's words, the APIs "will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup."

The reason is visible in what replaced it. Search results are now an input to AI agents, and Microsoft wants that input to flow through Azure's agent products instead of being resold by third parties. We cover how this fits with Google's moves against scrapers in [the 2026 search API crackdown](/blog/search-api-crackdown-2026-serpapi-lawsuit-bing-shutdown).

The shutdown also broke apps that never called Bing directly. Several "multi-engine" search APIs quietly proxied Bing, and lost that supply overnight. **If a search vendor will not say where its results come from, assume the same risk applies to it.**

## Is Grounding with Bing Search a replacement?

**Only if your agent already runs inside Microsoft's Foundry Agent Service and you want answers, not results.** Grounding with Bing Search lets an Azure-hosted model search Bing and write a cited answer. It is priced at $14 per 1,000 transactions, with published capacity of 150 transactions per second and 1 million a day ([Microsoft pricing](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/grounding-pricing)). Launch coverage in 2025 quoted $35 per 1,000, so check the page before you budget.

Four differences decide it:

| | Old Bing Web Search v7 | Grounding with Bing Search |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | JSON list of results: title, URL, snippet | A model's answer with citations |
| Where it runs | Any app, any cloud | Only Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Search |
| Reusing the output | Your app parses and stores results | Microsoft says outputs "are not directly accessible for use in other applications or programs" |
| Display rules | Attribution | Citations and the Bing query link must be shown to the end user |

**If your code read `webPages.value` and did something with the URLs, Grounding with Bing cannot replace it.** You need a search API that returns results.

## What are the best Bing Search API alternatives?

Prices from each vendor's own pricing page or docs, checked September and October 2026.

| Alternative | Index source | Price per 1,000 | Free allowance | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| **Keirolabs** | Own index, plus Google SERP | from $0.25 (lite), $0.10 (SERP) | 1,250 credits/month, no card | AI agents that need results plus page content |
| **Parallel** | Own index | $1 (Turbo, Fast), $5 (Basic, Advanced) | Free hosted MCP, no key | Dense excerpts for agents |
| **Brave Search API** | Own index (30B+ pages, per Brave) | $5 | $5 credit/month | Independent index, news, images, high throughput |
| **Perplexity Search API** | Perplexity's index | $5 | none | Ranked results from a top-scoring engine |
| **Exa** | Own neural index | $7 (10 results) | $20 at signup + $10/month | Semantic, find-similar search |
| **Tavily** | Multiple sources | $8 basic, pay as you go | 1,000 credits/month | RAG pipelines and LangChain stacks |
| **DataForSEO** | Scrapes Bing and Google | $0.60 per 1,000 Bing SERPs | – | Bing rankings and SERP data |
| **SerpAPI** | Scrapes Google, Bing and others | $25/month for 1,000, up to $2,750/month for 500,000 | – | Exact search engine result pages |
| **Google Custom Search JSON API** | Google, limited | $5 after 100 free/day | 100 queries/day | Small projects only; it ends January 1, 2027 |

Sources: [DataForSEO and Grounding prices via apiserpent](https://apiserpent.com/blog/bing-search-api-alternatives), [Brave pricing](https://api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/pricing), [Parallel](https://parallel.ai/articles/parallel-vs-serpapi-vs-brave-vs-bing), [Perplexity](https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/agent-api/models), [Exa](/blog/exa-api-pricing-2026), [Tavily](/blog/tavily-search-api-pricing-per-1000-requests-2026), [Google](/blog/google-search-apis-2026), [Keirolabs](https://keirolabs.cloud/pricing). Disclosure: Keirolabs is ours.

## Which alternative fits your old Bing use case?

| You used Bing for... | Use instead | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Grounding an LLM or agent with fresh results | Keirolabs, Parallel or Brave | Own indexes, LLM-ready output, no supply risk from someone else's engine |
| A chatbot that answers with sources | Perplexity Sonar, or Keirolabs `/answer` | Returns the cited answer directly |
| Rank tracking or SEO reporting on Bing | DataForSEO or SerpAPI | You need Bing's actual result page and positions |
| News search | Brave or Tavily | Strong freshness; Brave has a dedicated news endpoint |
| Image or video search | Brave | Dedicated image and video endpoints |
| An agent already inside Azure AI Foundry | Grounding with Bing Search | The supported path, if you accept the display and reuse rules |
| Finding similar pages or companies | Exa | Built for semantic similarity |

**For most AI applications, an independent index is the safer choice, because it is the supply rather than a reseller of it.** Bing's shutdown is exactly the supply risk that scraper-based and proxy APIs carry.

## How do you migrate code off Bing Web Search v7?

**The migration is mostly a response-mapping job: Bing returned `webPages.value[]` with `name`, `url` and `snippet`, and every alternative returns an equivalent list under different field names.** Write one adapter and keep the rest of your code unchanged.

```python
# Before: Bing Web Search v7 (retired)
# r = requests.get("https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search",
#                  headers={"Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key": KEY}, params={"q": q})
# results = [{"title": x["name"], "url": x["url"], "snippet": x["snippet"]}
#            for x in r.json()["webPages"]["value"]]

# After: one adapter, any provider. Example with Keirolabs search.
import os, requests

def search(q: str, n: int = 10) -> list[dict]:
    r = requests.post("https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/search/fast",
                      headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KEIRO_API_KEY']}"},
                      json={"query": q, "maxResults": n}, timeout=30)
    r.raise_for_status()
    return [{"title": x.get("title"), "url": x.get("url"), "snippet": x.get("snippet")}
            for x in r.json().get("results", [])]
```

Five things to check during the move:

1. **Market and language parameters.** Bing used `mkt` and `setLang`; each alternative names these differently, and some only support a country code.
2. **Freshness filters.** Bing's `freshness=Day|Week|Month` maps to date filters that vary by provider.
3. **Result count.** Bing returned up to 50 per call; some providers charge more per result above 10, Exa among them.
4. **Safe search** defaults differ; set it explicitly.
5. **Rate limits.** Brave allows 50 requests per second, Parallel 600 a minute by default; check yours against your old Bing tier's throughput.

## What does a migration cost?

For an app that ran 100,000 Bing queries a month (the old S1 tier was roughly $25 per 1,000, or about $2,500):

| Replacement | Monthly cost at 100,000 queries |
|---|---|
| Keirolabs lite search | about $25 |
| Parallel Turbo or Fast | about $100 |
| Brave Search plan | about $500 |
| Perplexity Search API | about $500 |
| Exa (10 results) | about $700 |
| Tavily, pay as you go | about $800 |
| Grounding with Bing Search | about $1,400, plus the Azure model costs |

**Every independent search API on this list costs less than the old Bing S1 rate, and less than its official replacement.** The Bing shutdown was painful to migrate, but it did not make search more expensive for anyone willing to leave Microsoft's stack.

## The short answer

Do not wait for a Bing API to come back; Microsoft has none to sell. For AI apps, move to an independent index: **Keirolabs** or **Parallel** for the lowest price, **Brave** for breadth and throughput. For Bing rankings, use **DataForSEO** or **SerpAPI**. Use **Grounding with Bing Search** only if your agents already live inside Azure AI Foundry.