Microsoft Gives Websites More Control Over Content In Bing

Microsoft announced new options for publishers to limit their content use in Bing’s new AI-powered chatbot feature.

The tech giant aims to address concerns raised by publishers while allowing website discovery through regular search results.

Addressing Publisher Concerns

Since Microsoft unveiled its revamped Bing search engine with chatbot capabilities, publishers have voiced concerns about using their content without permission.

Following discussions with web admins and publishers, Microsoft understood the need for more control over using their content in Bing Chat.

While discussions with the industry are ongoing, Microsoft decided to provide immediate support to address the publishers’ concerns.

Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, states:

“We are pleased to share that we have built on standard controls that webmasters use today to control indexing and snippet length on Bing.”

Enhanced Control for Publishers

In response to publisher concerns, Microsoft is enabling existing meta tags to restrict content usage in Bing Chat answers.

Publishers now have several ways to control their content, each impacting how it’s used in Bing Chat and AI models.

Publishers can control how Bing Chat uses their content by utilizing the following options:

• Taking no action means the content may be included in Bing Chat answers and used to train Microsoft’s AI models.
• Adding a NOCACHE tag means only titles, snippets, and URLs can appear in Bing Chat or train AI models.
• Adding a NOARCHIVE tag prevents any usage in Bing Chat or AI training.

To ensure that paywall articles are discoverable, Microsoft suggests adding the NOCACHE value to the NOARCHIVE value, as most paywall sites use only the NOARCHIVE tag.

Canel stresses that content blocked from Bing Chat won’t be blocked from search:

“We can assure publishers that content with the NOCACHE tag or NOARCHIVE tag will still appear in our search results.”

Looking Ahead

As Microsoft continues to work with the industry on future AI standards, it’s committed to maintaining open communication with publishers and the web ecosystem.

Microsoft promises to give web admins reasonable time to adapt and migrate to future AI standards.