Grounding with Bing Search (Microsoft Foundry)
Microsoft AzureAgent tool in Microsoft Foundry Agent Service that grounds a model's answer in live Bing results. The developer never sees the search results: the agent formulates queries, Bing returns results to the model, and the model's answer comes back with URL citations.
Product identity needs care here and the seeded URL made it worse. `/azure/ai-foundry/agents/how-to/tools/bing-grounding` 200s but redirects to a page marked (classic), for agents that are deprecated and retire on 2027-03-31 - a naive liveness check passes while landing on a deprecation notice. The grounding SERVICE is not retiring: on the current agents API it is one of three siblings, alongside a Web Search tool that needs no Bing resource of your own and a preview Bing Custom Search. The platform was renamed from Azure AI Foundry to Microsoft Foundry.
Openness
1 high confidence- license
- Proprietary(API-only)
- source
- closed(no index or serving code published
- managed
- cloud SaaS with API keys, billed per tool call against a first-party Bing resource
Closed, and further outside the caller's reach than most: the tool is a First Party Consumption Service whose terms sit outside the Azure compliance boundary, and Microsoft requires that its citations be displayed in the exact form provided. The `azure-ai-projects` SDK is MIT and is a client for the whole Foundry surface rather than for this tool.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/tools/web-overview recorded 2026-09-17
The three web tools on the current agents API - Web Search, Grounding with Bing Search, Grounding with Bing Custom Search - with "Use of Grounding with Bing Search and Grounding with Bing Custom Search incurs costs" and the statement that these are First Party Consumption Services whose data "flows outside the Azure compliance and Geo boundary". No self-hosting and no published source.
Adoption
4 medium confidenceGrounding with Bing Search is a first-party Microsoft Foundry Agent Service tool, one of several ways to reach the live web there, and Microsoft publishes no call-volume figure for it. Google's grounding tool is the default web path across the Gemini app, AI Studio and Vertex AI, and OpenAI's is the default in the Responses API; Bing's tool is one option rather than a platform default.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/tools/web-overview recorded 2026-09-17
The vendor's own documentation for the tool, establishing that it is a first-party feature of the platform surface the record names as the countable surface and that no usage figure is published for it.
Capability
5 high confidenceGrounding with Bing Search returns only an answer with citations: Microsoft's documentation states directly that developers and end users never receive the tool's raw output. Nothing about search or retrieval is available beyond that answer, which puts it level with Perplexity's Sonar API on what a developer gets back.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry-classic/agents/how-to/tools-classic/bing-grounding recorded 2026-09-16
"Developers and end users don't have access to raw content returned from Grounding with Bing Search. The model response, however, includes citations with links to the websites used to generate the response, and a link to the Bing query used for the search." Restated as a limitation: "Grounding with Bing Search tool does NOT return the tool output to developers and end users." Also carries the deprecation notice for agents (classic), retiring 2027-03-31.
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/agents/how-to/tools/web-search recorded 2026-09-17
The current tool page: "the model can return up-to-date answers with inline citations". Establishes that the answer-with-citations contract is the current product's as well as the classic one's.
Verified 2026-09-17