Bing has announced a set of new controls to allow webmasters and site owners to block Bing Chat from using its content for AI training and Microsoft’s generative AI models. “While we are actively collaborating with the industry on establishing future AI standards, we also wanted to provide more immediate support for publishers,” Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us.
The controls. Here are the options you can implement to control how Bing uses or does not use your content for Bing Chat or other Microsoft generative AI models:
- No action is needed to remain in Bing Chat. Content without NOCACHE tag and without NOARCHIVE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers and will benefit from AI’s ability to generate more helpful answers and to increase your ranking opportunities in Bing Chat; site content may be used in training our generative AI foundation models.
- Content with the NOCACHE tag may be included in Bing Chat answers. Bing will only display URL/Snippet/Title in the answer; Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOCACHE, only URLs, Titles and Snippets may be used in training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- • Content tagged NOARCHIVE will not be included in Bing Chat answers, not be linked to in the answers. Going forward, for content in our Bing Index that is labeled NOARCHIVE, Bing will not use the content for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- If content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, we will treat it as NOCACHE.
Bing added that content with the NOCACHE tag or NOARCHIVE tag will still appear in the Bing search results.
To help Bing Chat users find paywall articles, Bing said it recommends adding the NOCACHE value to the NOARCHIVE value.
Bing has more details on how this works within its meta tags help documentation.
Bigger initiatives. Google announced it was working with the AI community on an alternative to the robots.txt protocol for AI models. But clearly Bing didn’t want this to drag out too long and not give site owners controls now, while AI is growing so fast. So Bing decided to leverage what is there now to give us options on how Bing Chat and Microsoft can use our content for its AI ventures.
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About the author
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.