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PUBLISHED ON
May 15, 2025
Why is Microsoft shutting Bing’s APIs down?
According to Microsoft, the company is “pivoting to AI solutions” and wants developers to use its Azure AI Agents instead of raw search data.
Bing’s self-serve API tier was already hard to justify, after multiple rounds of price hikes, but now it’s disappearing entirely.
Only a handful of large, private-contract customers are allowed to keep access. For everyone else, they'll have to migrate by August 11th.
Exa was built for AI applications
Unlike legacy engines that built an API on top of their consumer search stack, Exa built our search for AI agent use cases:
Embedding-first search: Every document in our index is encoded with custom neural embeddings. Queries best served by keyword search are automatically routed there.
No SEO clutter: Traditional engines optimize for consumer clicks, so SEO-driven listicles often crowd the top results. Exa ranks results purely on content relevance - search “Top startups in SF” and you get the actual startups, not articles about them.
Full-text, real-time contents: Retrieve entire page contents (not just snippets) and live crawl when freshness matters.
High controllability: Filter by domain, vertical, date range, data category and more, in a single call.
Scalable costs: 5x cheaper than Bing.
Microsoft is moving in the direction of black-box search via Azure Agents. We believe developers need visibility and control over the data fed into their agents. Exa delivers exactly that.
SimpleQA Benchmark Evaluation
Migrating in minutes
Switching is as simple as:
from exa_py import Exa
exa = Exa(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
result = exa.search(
"latest developments in ML"
)You can get started here with our quick start guide.
Have questions? Reach out to hello@exa.ai
