Here’s why Microsoft is threatening to cut off competitors’ access to Bing data

Microsoft plans to prevent its competitors from using Bing’s search index to fuel their AI chatbots. As per a report by Bloomberg, Microsoft informed two unnamed search engines powered by Bing that if they continue using Microsoft’s search data with their AI tools, the company will limit their access to it completely.

According to the report, Microsoft has licensed Bing’s search data to numerous search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and the AI search engine You.com. Although DuckDuckGo uses a blend of its own web crawler and Bing to produce search results, You.com and Neeva also incorporate some of their outcomes from Bing, resulting in significant time and resource savings that would otherwise have been required to crawl the whole internet.