GoKawiilMicrosoft predicts that, soon, most online searches will be completed by artificial intelligence agents acting on behalf of humans, rather than humans themselves. And the big tech company has just announced Microsoft Web IQ, its new suite of APIs built for AI agents that helps them scrape the web faster and more comprehensively.
Web IQ is a search engine for AI systems, Microsoft said during its annual developers conference, Microsoft Build, on Tuesday. It connects AI tools to information across the web, but presents it in a different way than a search engine would for a human.
"We traditionally have had search engines for humans, like Bing," Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's president of search and AI, told CNET during an interview on Monday morning.
Ribas said what's rapidly growing now is search engines for agents. "Web IQ is our solution for this type of search engine, and it provides this context ... the web documents, news, images, videos that are relevant for an agent query, and then they're used by the agent for grounding."
While humans and robots search differently, Microsoft was able to lean on its expertise from Bing to build Web IQ.
"We've leveraged everything that we've done in the last 20 years from Bing, while at the same time re-architecting and rebuilding it from the ground up to make sure we have a very optimized search engine for agents," Ribas said.
The difference between search activity by humans versus AI agents comes down to how the information is presented. For humans, that means ranking search results according to what the person is trying to find. For AI agents, it looks like a comprehensive but condensed page of results to parse without using too many tokens. So Web IQ had to deliver high-quality results quickly, in a compact package.
Tokens are small bits of written text -- usually around four characters in the English language per token -- that AI models process to form responses to your prompts. The more tokens the AI model uses, the more expensive the output is.
Agentic AI is the next step beyond chatbots. Instead of an AI telling you which steps to take, it steps in and completes tasks on your behalf. You may have already dealt with some forms of agentic AI, like self-driving cars and smart home assistants, but the latest AI agents, like OpenClaw, can operate far more independently.
Ribas said Web IQ leads the industry across search result quality, token efficiency and latency -- 95% of the time, it responds in less than 165 milliseconds -- and in token efficiency. Microsoft said it's around 2.5 times faster than any other product out there.
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