Microsoft has released its new grounding API named Web IQ. Web IQ is a “suite of AI-native grounding APIs built for the agentic era, connecting AI systems and agents to fresh, real-world intelligence from across the web — including web pages, news, images, and videos,” Microsoft announced.
What is Web IQ. Web IQ is a suite of Microsoft’s AI-native grounding APIs built for the agentic era, for AI-agents work. Web IQ connects AI systems and agents to fresh, real-world information from across the web, including web pages, news, images, and videos. This is powered by Bing’s index and the its best of how Bing understands the web.
Web IQ utilizes the same API infrastructure operating at inside Microsoft Copilot and many other leading AI systems, including ChatGPT.
But this is not the same APIs that Copilot and ChatGPT initially used when those LLMs launched, it is rebuilt from the ground up to be efficient, fast and of course, relevant, Jordi Ribas, President of Search & AI at Microsoft. It is used by Bing to show the Copilot answers at the top of the Bing search results for some queries, it is used by ChatGPT for some of its web answers and it is used directly in Copilot for answers.
Search for agents (not humans). Web IQ provides search results designed for AI-agents, not humans. While Bing Search for humans prioritizes ranking, ranking is less important for agents, Jordi Ribas told Search Engine Land. Agents want to extract the right information from the documents, package it and deliver it quickly.
Agents don’t just enter a single query and stop searching, like many humans. Agents go deeper and continue to search, fan-out, if you will. “It required re-architecting the system from the ground up from indexing and retrieval to ranking, passage selection, and orchestration so every layer is aligned around the needs of inference-time grounding,” Microsoft said.
Because of how often agents search, Microsoft built Web IQ to be efficient and use the fewest tokens as possible. Microsoft said, “fewer tokens in, better answers out, lower cost per call.” It is also fast,
roughly 2.5x faster than the next best alternative, Microsoft said.
Access and availability. Right now, Web IQ is being used by Microsoft for Copilot and by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other larger LLM platforms. Microsoft does plan to expand access as it scales.
Microsoft said to express interest in Web IQ, go to this page.
Why we care. As the web adapts and begins to support agentic experiences, like AI-agents, these are changes we need to watch careful and be ready to adopt as they become available.
The web is changing, adapting, for AI and so you need to make sure your websites change and adapt along with it.
It doesn’t mean humans are going away but AI-agents will be coming, if not already, so you need to prepare for this next evolution of the web.
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