Microsoft just announced new Bing AI content controls "offering newer, simpler, and clearer preferences that allow you to make choices about training, grounding, or both while remaining eligible for Bing search results," Krishna Madhavan, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft Bing, wrote. Google is also on board, as is OpenAI and Anthropic.
In summary, this gives site owners three main options, including:
- AI Training setting to allow or prevent your content from being used to train AI models.
- AI Grounding setting to allow or prevent your content from being used to help generate AI answers.
- Limited Grounding setting to allow your content to support Microsoft's own AI products, but not its third-party grounding services.
This means you can block AI training but still appear in AI answers. For example, a publisher could prevent Microsoft from using its articles to train models while still allowing Copilot to cite those articles. You can block AI answers from using your content but doing so can reduce your visibility in AI experiences. The traditional Bing rankings are unaffected.
Here is the timeline for these changes:
- December 15, 2026: Temporary grounding controls become available in Bing Webmaster Tools for eligible sites using the older NoArchive or NoCache directives.
- February 1, 2027: Microsoft begins honoring the new preferences as it crawls pages.
- March 1, 2027: Deadline for publishers using the old directives to configure the new preferences if they want to maintain their restrictions.
- September 30, 2027: Temporary grounding preferences expire.
The changes seem to add on to Bing's existing controls for managing how website content appears in AI-generated answers. Bing Webmaster Tools also offers an AI Performance reporting that shows citations, cited URLs and grounding queries across supported AI experiences. The new preferences give publishers more granular control over how their content can be used, separating AI model training from the use of content to generate AI answers while preserving traditional search visibility.
There are a lot more detail over here in the blog post and the documentation over here.
Microsoft is joining industry peers in announcing a shared AI training preference in robots.txt - and going further with granular page-level training preferences and a separate grounding preference for publishers and site owners, the company announced.
Forum discussion at X.
