Microsoft Web IQ - A new Pareto Frontier for AI grounding

AI applications are only as good as the information they reason from. Microsoft Web IQ is a suite of AI-native APIs that gives applications access to fresh, real-world intelligence from across the web – including web pages, news, images, and videos.

The choice of AI platforms like Copilot, OpenAI, and Nasdaq.

Fewer tokens in, better answers out, lower cost per call

Quality - Highest grounding satisfaction

Provides the highest quality response compared to today's best alternative.

Speed - Fastest speed

164ms p95 - nearly 2.5x faster than today's best alternative.

Efficiency - Fewest tokens per query

Delivers on quality and speed with significantly fewer tokens than alternatives.

Efficiency without excess

Highest quality answers with the fewest tokens.

Web IQ operates on a new Pareto curve of efficiency. By prioritizing the most relevant passages and minimizing unnecessary context, it cuts token usage per query – which reduces reasoning time and tokens – and lowers the total cost of delivering high-quality responses. These gains compound across high-volume workloads, making AI systems more accurate and cost-effective in production.

Quality without compromise

Highest grounding satisfaction.

Delivering more complete, structured context – drawing from web, news, images, video – Web IQ improves the accuracy and consistency of AI-generated responses. This leads to higher grounding satisfaction and greater user trust, especially in domains where source quality, freshness, and attribution directly impact decision-making.

Speed without trade-offs

Nearly 2.5x faster than today's best alternative.

Fast grounding enables AI systems to operate responsively across multi-step agent chains and dynamic queries. By reducing latency at each step, Web IQ keeps workflows moving and compounds performance across complex interactions.

"The next step for Nasdaq Boardvantage® was to incorporate external information safely and with strict data isolation. Microsoft Web IQ allows us to query external data at lightning speed and returns highly accurate results without forcing us to bolt on a separate system or compromise on security." - Mohsin Shafqat, Director of Software Engineering, Nasdaq

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Web IQ?: Web IQ is Microsoft's state-of-the-art grounding service for AI agents and assistants. It returns ranked, citation-ready context across web, news, images, video, and more. Designed for direct injection into an LLM's context window, it's built on twenty years of Bing search infrastructure and re-architected for an era of LLMs and multi-step agents.
2. What makes Web IQ different from other grounding services?: Five things: (1) industry-leading grounding quality, validated against benchmarks including DeepSearchQA, grounding satisfaction, and freshness; (2) sub-second end-to-end grounding with 164ms P95 latency, optimized for multi-step agent chains; (3) content supply combining licensed sources, structured data sources, and the open web – not SERP scraping; (4) model-agnostic and MCP-native via JSON-RPC 2.0 – no inference lock-in; and (5) full-spectrum coverage across six+ verticals including commerce, not just web and news.
3. What data does Web IQ cover?: Web IQ provides full-spectrum coverage across real-world information sources – including web, news, images, video, and more – returning citation-ready context for AI agents. It combines the open web with licensed and specialized data sources to deliver more comprehensive, authoritative grounding for high-stakes use cases. Results are ranked and optimized for relevance, freshness, and authority – not just a list of links – delivering more complete answers that improve grounding satisfaction and user trust.
4. How global is Web IQ?: Web IQ operates at global scale, with coverage across 100+ languages and markets. Built on decades of search infrastructure, it delivers fresh, relevant results worldwide - enabling AI agents to reason over real-world information regardless of geography.
5. What does integration look like?: Send a query via REST, MCP (JSON-RPC 2.0), or SDK. Pass natural language, structured parameters, or both. Web IQ returns a structured JSON payload with titles, URLs, snippets, timestamps, and provenance – all ready to inject into your model's context window with no post-processing required.
6. Who is eligible to use Web IQ?: Web IQ is currently available in limited access to select enterprise customers building AI agents and applications at scale. Access is prioritized for organizations working with Microsoft account teams and developing production AI workloads that require high-quality, current, real-world grounding.
7. How is Web IQ different from Grounding with Bing?: Web IQ is purpose-built for AI agents and multi-step workflows, while Grounding with Bing is designed for traditional search and enabling integrated web augmentation experiences within Azure Foundry. Grounding with Bing remains available for existing customers as an accessible entry point. Web IQ returns structured, citation-ready semantic data directly to the developer, enabling full control over how results are used within an LLM workflow. As a next-generation, agent-native platform with limited access availability, Web IQ is designed for developers who need direct access to high-quality content and fine-grained control over retrieval and orchestration. By combining content with passage-level retrieval, Web IQ surfaces only the most relevant information, improving answer quality, reducing token usage, and enabling more transparent and controllable AI systems.

Bring accurate, high-performance grounding to your AI agents - available in limited access. Join the waitlist at https://aka.ms/webiq-waitlist