Home / Bing / Microsoft Bing On Search Indexing vs. Grounding Indexing May 7, 2026 - 7:41 am 0 — by The folks over at Microsoft Bing put together a blog post explaining the differences between indexing for Search versus indexing for Grounding (AI responses) and the differences. Krishna Madhavan, Knut Risvik, Meenaz Merchant from Microsoft wrote , "Indexing for grounded AI answers is not a reinvention of search – it is a major evolution of it. Grounding commits to an answer." That is a big statement that seems very different from Google's messaging around similar topics . "The shift we described at the opening is worth restating plainly: search indexing was built to help humans decide what to read. Grounding indexing is being built to help AI systems decide what to say. The infrastructure required to do those two things well is not the same – even when it starts from the same foundation," Microsoft Bing's team wrote. Traditional search asks: which pages should a user visit?…