Say your company publishes an installation guide for a piece of equipment. When customers search for the model in Bing, you want them to find the guide. If they ask Copilot how much clearance to leave, you want it to be able to use the guide and link back to the page. You also want to decline use of the guide for future model training.
The installation guide is a way to see how the two independent preferences in Microsoft’s October 30, 2026 announcement would work. This explainer covers only the October announcement and what web teams can do to prepare. As of November 15, 2026, the new settings have yet to take effect. Microsoft plans to start honoring them as it crawls from February 1, 2027. They cover content collected by Microsoft’s web crawlers. The preferences leave the page eligible for ordinary Bing search results under the usual crawl and indexing requirements. Microsoft Bing announcement
Choose the settings for the guide
For this guide, set AI Training to Disallow to decline its use in future generative model training. Keep AI Grounding at Allow so the guide can inform a response as it is generated. If you want grounding only in Microsoft-operated services such as Copilot, choose DisallowExtended. That excludes grounding services Microsoft provides to third parties. Allowing grounding makes the page eligible to inform an answer that may link back to it. Microsoft gives no guarantee of inclusion or visits. Bing’s preference options and scope
The web team can set AI Training for a site or path in robots.txt and override it on an individual page. AI Grounding is set page by page through a meta tag or HTTP response header. Both preferences default to Allow when no applicable preference is set. The proposed training signal in robots.txt is described in an Internet-Draft published October 30, 2026, that remains a work in progress. Bing’s implementation guide · Internet-Draft on the IETF Datatracker
Check for NoArchive or NoCache
- December 15, 2026. Microsoft plans to open a temporary grounding preference in Bing Webmaster Tools for sites using
NoArchiveorNoCacheas of that date. - February 1, 2027. Microsoft plans to start honoring the new preferences as it crawls. Once Microsoft detects a new AI Training or AI Grounding preference on a site, it says it will disregard legacy tags still present there.
- March 1, 2027. Microsoft will stop reading the legacy tags as training or grounding preferences. Sites that want to retain grounding restrictions should publish their new page preferences and record a temporary grounding preference before this date. For training, publish the new preference on the site. Bing Webmaster Tools offers a temporary setting only for grounding.
- September 30, 2027. Any remaining temporary preferences expire. Where Microsoft discovers a new grounding preference on a page during an earlier recrawl, the page setting takes over then.
Microsoft Bing’s transition schedule
Start with one guide that customers rely on. For a public guide, ask whether an answer that links back to the page would help customers, and decide separately whether to allow future training. Set aside pages behind a login, customer-specific documents and pages with sensitive information for a separate review of who can access them.
Have the content owner approve the two choices and record them against the guide’s URL. Ask the web team to audit the site’s robots.txt, page templates and HTTP headers. If the site uses either legacy tag, do this before December 15 so the team can check eligibility for the Bing Webmaster Tools transition. After the team applies the choices, check the actual page and response headers for the settings Microsoft should see on its next crawl.
