Microsoft is Retiring Bing Search APIs

In a sudden and unexpected move, Microsoft revealed today that it will retire its Bing Search APIs for developers in August. There isn’t a lot of information about the change, but reports claim that bigger customers like DuckDuckGo will be unaffected.

“Bing Search APIs will be retired on  August 11, 2025,” a terse announcement on the Microsoft Azure Updates site explains. “Any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”

Microsoft recommends that customers that wish to continue accessing Bing Search results consider using the Bing Search grounding capabilities in its Azure AI Agents offering instead. Grounding with Bing returns relevant search results to the customer’s model deployment, which then generates the final output, Microsoft says.

The Bing Search APIs were used by third-party search engines to create rivals to Google Search, but they’ve never been hugely popular and Microsoft apparently raised the fees dramatically and introduced various usage restrictions.