Bing adds AI-generation captions to some search result snippets

Bing is now using AI to generate captions for some of its search result snippets. Bing is using GPT-4 to make the “search results more relevant and informative and helping users find the websites they are looking for more quickly,” Bing announced.

What it looks like. If you do a search for my, [barry schwartz SEO], and then click on the arrow down by the title link in the search results, you can see that some of the results are labeled with “AI-Generated Caption.”

Here is a screenshot:

How it works. Bing said it uses GPT-4 for these AI-Generated Captions by analyzing the search query of the user, it then “extracts the most pertinent insights from web pages, and skillfully transforms them into highly relevant and easily digestible snippets,” Bing wrote.

“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,” Bing added.

Block AI-generated captions. Bing said you can block these AI-generated captions by using the NOCACHE or NOARCHIVE tags.  Bing Search also respects MAXSNIPPET and NOSNIPPET metatags; find further information in Bing’s documentation on meta tags

We have a lot more details on how that works in our previous article on that topic.

Why we care. You might want to check some of your more important keywords to see if Bing is changing the description in a way that may drive lower or higher click-through rates from Bing Search.

It makes sense to watch your click-through rate data in the Bing Webmaster Tools performance reports to see if you are impacted in any way by these AI-generated captions.