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Microsoft did away with its Bing Chat brand name in favor of Copilot for its chatbot AI services earlier this week. However, the company still has the Bing name for its search engine and its webmaster tools. This week, the company quietly revealed a new search tool design to offer concise info about the content of individual webpages.
In the official Bing blog, Microsoft announced what it called Generative AI Captions. It stated:
Harnessing the power of GPT 4, Generative Captions redefine the way searchers interact with search results. By analyzing a search query, it extracts the most pertinent insights from web pages, and skillfully transforms them into highly relevant and easily digestible snippets.
Generative Captions are tailored to each unique search query and may generate different snippets for different queries. Generative captions may not mirror the exact wording on the webpage, but Bing employs a myriad of signals and techniques to guarantee the quality and precision of the generated text.
Microsoft also allows webmasters who don’t want to have their webpage content summarized to use the NOCACHE or NOARCHIVE tags on those pages. More information on those tags can be found in this earlier post on the Bing blog. The blog post added that the company also respects the MAXSNIPPET and NOSNIPPET metatags.
Microsoft recently added new features to its Bing Webmaster tools that allow website admins to see how much traffic is being brought to their pages on the web and via Bing Chat (now Copilot) under the “Web + Chat” filter. It does merge both of those pieces of info into one filter so admins cannot see any specific info on how much traffic is being brought in by the chatbot alone.
Microsoft also recently launched its Bing Webmaster Tools app for Android smartphones and tablets so admins can keep track of their site’s traffic while on the go.