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How Is Bing’s Chat-Integrated Search Changing the Way People Discover Brands?

Web
15 Sep 2025

AI isn’t just answering questions – it’s reshaping how people explore products, services, and businesses online.

Bing’s chat-integrated search, powered by its partnership with OpenAI, is pushing the boundaries of traditional search. Instead of ten blue links, users are starting to see dynamic summaries, conversational responses and curated suggestions – all delivered in a friendly, chatbot-like format.

For brands, this evolution opens up new opportunities (and challenges) when it comes to visibility and discoverability. Here’s what’s changing, and what marketers need to do about it.

What is Bing Chat Search?

It’s Microsoft’s AI-powered layer on top of traditional search results. When users type a query into Bing, they now have the option to interact with a chatbot that:

  • Summarises key information
  • Suggests follow-up questions
  • Serves up links to relevant sources
  • Offers product recommendations and comparisons.

Think of it as search plus conversation, where answers are structured more like advice from a well-informed assistant rather than just a list of links.

The big shift: search is turning to dialogue

Users are starting to interact with search in a much more two-way style. They are likely to: 

  • Ask more nuanced or multi-part questions (eg ‘What’s the best project management software for a remote creative team?’)
  • Follow up with clarification (‘Can it integrate with Slack?’)
  • Discover brands based on relevance and authority, not just keyword matches.

As a consequence, brands that provide clear, well-structured content are more likely to be quoted, referenced or recommended by the AI interface.

How can brands get featured in Bing’s Chat layer?

While there’s no direct markup to ‘opt in’ to Bing Chat results, brands that want to show up should:

  • Optimise for topic authority, not just keywords
  • Use schema markup to make content machine-readable
  • Publish FAQ-style content and how-to guides
  • Ensure their site has a clean technical structure (fast, crawlable, no content bloat).

Bing’s AI draws from a mix of high-authority content and well-structured answers, so both credibility and clarity matter more than ever.

What’s the implication for brand discovery?

In traditional search, users often compare results across multiple pages. In AI-driven results, they’re shown fewer, but more curated, answers. That means:

  • If your brand is recommended, you could see a spike in traffic and trust
  • If you’re missing, you might not even be part of the conversation.

Being featured early in the journey – especially during the awareness and consideration phases – is critical. This is the new front line for SEO.

Voice and style matter more than ever

Bing’s chat search doesn’t just look for factual accuracy; it values helpfulness and tone too. The AI is trained to serve content that feels conversational, friendly and direct.

What this means, of course, is that your content should:

  • Answer questions clearly and directly
  • Use natural language (written in the way that people speak)
  • Avoid jargon unless your audience expects it.

Well-written blog posts and product pages are more likely to surface than keyword-stuffed landing pages.

Measure what you can (and stay ahead of the curve)

Since Bing Chat is still evolving, analytics around performance are limited, but you can:

  • Monitor referral traffic from Bing.com
  • Use Bing Webmaster Tools to track indexing and site health
  • Compare ranking shifts against content updates.

As chat-based search grows in prominence, the brands that experiment and measure now will have a head start in search marketing.

Final thought: Time to speak AI’s language

Bing’s chat-integrated search is a sign of where search is going. And that’s not just for Microsoft, but for the web as a whole: users are increasingly expecting clearer answers, faster paths to insight, and less friction.

Brands that respond with helpful, authoritative content in a clean, structured format are more likely to stay visible as search evolves.

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