Over one million people signed up to try the new AI-powered Bing

Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President & Consumer Marketing Office at Microsoft, announced last night that in 48 hours, over one million people had joined the waitlist for the new AI-powered Bing search engine.

One million. Yes, that is, one million people in 48 hours have signed up to try the new AI-powered Microsoft Bing search engine. Yusuf Mehdi posted, “We’re humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing! In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview. If you would like to join, go to http://bing.com/new!”

More details. On Tuesday, we covered the announcement of the new AI-powered search featured in Bing Search. We also explained how ads would be on the new Bing experience, how Bing had to update its webmaster guidelines to support the new chat experience, and we dug a bit more into the relevancy boost Bing had thanks to AI.

Nicole Farley also showed us her test drive of the new AI Bing.

Why we care. If Microsoft can pull away some market share from Google with this new Bing, then that might change how marketers and SEOs spend their days. In the old days of SEO, SEOs had to optimize for Google, Ask, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and several other search engines.

Right now, SEOs and PPCers are pretty much focused on Google Search and Google Ads. But will this new search experience help Microsoft gain share? If so, your focus as a marketer may need to change.