Bing splits AI training from AI grounding in new publisher controls
What this answers
- Can I block Bing from training AI on my site but still appear in AI answers?
- Yes. Microsoft's new preferences treat AI Training and AI Grounding as independent settings, so a site can disallow training and still allow its pages to inform generated responses. Neither setting changes eligibility for traditional Bing results.
- When do Bing's new AI Training and AI Grounding preferences take effect?
- Microsoft says it will honor them as it crawls starting February 1, 2027, and asks sites relying on NoArchive or NoCache to act by March 1, 2027, after which those tags no longer count as training or grounding preferences.
Microsoft said on Oct. 30 that publishers can now set AI Training and AI Grounding preferences independently, without changing eligibility for Bing search results (per the Microsoft Bing Blog). AI Training is the shared robots.txt preference from the IETF’s AI Preferences work, which Microsoft also extends to individual pages. AI Grounding, meaning use of content to inform generated answers, is a separate page-level setting with three values: Allow, Disallow, and a new DisallowExtended, which limits grounding to Microsoft’s own experiences such as Copilot and Microsoft 365 and excludes grounding services it supplies to third parties.
Microsoft will honor the new preferences as it crawls from Feb. 1, 2027, and they replace NoArchive and NoCache for these purposes; sites relying on those tags must act by March 1, 2027, including recording a temporary grounding preference in Bing Webmaster Tools. Both settings default to Allow, and Microsoft says choosing Disallow or DisallowExtended for grounding means reduced brand visibility in AI experiences. It adds that neither choice guarantees inclusion, traffic or payment. Grounding can be set only per page; the post offers no site-wide robots.txt option for it.
Why it matters: Search engines have so far folded 'may this be used to train a model' and 'may this be cited in an answer' into one blunt choice; Bing separating them, with a robots.txt training signal and a page-level grounding signal, makes the second decision something a publisher sets deliberately.
The record: Microsoft BingMicrosoft
Glossary: Grounding
Via Microsoft Bing Blog ↗ · Search Engine Roundtable ↗
Posted to the wire October 30, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.