Alternatives
Grounding with Bing Search alternatives
Microsoft's designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Grounding with Bing Search at a glance
- Vendor
- Microsoft
- Category
- Platform grounding
- Own index
- Yes — Bing index, via Azure AI Foundry
- Price per 1,000
- $14
- Free tier
- None — paid or pay-as-you-go Azure subscriptions only; free-credit subscriptions are not eligible
- Rate limit
- 150 transactions / sec; 1 million / day
- MCP server
- No
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
Pricing detail. $14 per 1,000 transactions, counted per tool call within an agent run, with model costs billed separately. Available only inside Azure AI Foundry Agent Service or as a web knowledge source in Azure AI Search, and the raw results are not returned to the developer.
Why teams look for a Grounding with Bing Search alternative
It is reachable only through Azure AI Foundry, which means the dependency is not a search API but a platform: an Azure subscription, Foundry resources, and that service's own lifecycle. Teams not otherwise on Azure find the integration surface much larger than the feature they wanted.
The second reason is the recent history. The standalone Bing Web Search API was retired in August 2025 with new account creation quietly disabled five months earlier, and the same index now reaching customers through a platform product rather than a direct API is a fact that informs how people plan around it.
Where Grounding with Bing Search beats us
The Bing index is large, current and genuinely independent of Google, and if you are already building inside Azure AI Foundry the grounding integration is close to free in engineering terms. For an enterprise whose procurement, compliance and identity all already run through Azure, that institutional fit outweighs a great deal of API design.
Every page in this section names this. A comparison that cannot say where the other product wins is an advertisement.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kWe are a retrieval API rather than a platform feature, which is the whole trade. You lose the configuration-flag integration and the largest index in the world; you gain filters, corroboration thresholds, exact-term requirements, an explicit answer about absence, and a per-1,000 price you can forecast from your own traffic.
Grounding with Google Search
$14/1kGoogle's first-party grounding for Gemini. The best index in the world, billed per search query on top of tokens, and only usable from Gemini.
Bing Web Search API
For a decade the default independent web search API. Retired on 11 August 2025, taking Web, Image, News, Video, Entity and Custom Search with it.
Retired 11 August 2025
OpenAI web search tool
The built-in search tool in the Responses API. Zero integration work if you are already on OpenAI, and no control over retrieval whatsoever.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Perplexity
$1/1kRaw web search over its own index through the Search API, and search with synthesis through the Agent API, which replaced Sonar Chat Completions in September 2026.
Bright Data
$1.50/1kProxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
Sources
- Grounding with Bing Searchread 7 October 2026
- Bing APIs pricingread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Grounding with Bing Search?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 searches against $14 for Grounding with Bing Search's Grounding with Bing Search transactions (one per tool call). If you need the largest possible index, Grounding with Bing Search may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Grounding with Bing Search own its own web index?
Yes — Bing index, via Azure AI Foundry. That matters because a provider without its own index inherits the deprecation and repricing risk of whoever it depends on.
How much does Grounding with Bing Search cost?
$14 per 1,000 transactions, counted per tool call within an agent run, with model costs billed separately. Available only inside Azure AI Foundry Agent Service or as a web knowledge source in Azure AI Search, and the raw results are not returned to the developer.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free credits a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.