Grounding is the system that connects AI to current, authoritative information — helping ensure answers are informed by the world beyond the model’s training. As AI assistants increasingly become how people interact with information, grounding is moving onto the critical path between human questions and digital knowledge. It’s a layer that’s often invisible, but absolutely essential in today’s state-of-the-art AI.
At Microsoft, we’ve been steadily advancing grounding technology for a while, building on decades of operating large‑scale search and information systems through Bing and focusing on scale, reliability, and trust.
And today, Microsoft grounding powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market.
While much of our work happens behind the scenes, it plays an essential and profound role in today’s AI ecosystem, providing users with answers that are fluent, factually correct, and genuinely helpful.
The Web Enters a New Era
Since the early days of the Internet, users have been browsing with typical patterns: typing queries, clicking on results, and selecting content that best shapes their needs. However, as AI assistants do more of the work, it’s the agents doing the browsing – and with far more precision – acting more as retrievers, drawn to structured, verifiable, and applicable content. This changes the needs of the web’s infrastructure, and therefore the infrastructure it’s built on. Enter grounding.
This is driving the emergence of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of understanding how content participates in AI-driven experiences. In an AI‑first world, visibility is no longer defined only by rankings or clicks. It’s about how content contributes to answers, citations, reasoning, and ultimately, outcomes.
To help content owners navigate this shift, we are introducing new visibility through updates to Bing Webmaster Tools. These capabilities provide early insight into how content contributes to AI-generated experiences, including citation and grounding signals. Think of this as a first window into a broader GEO toolset, one that will continue to evolve as AI becomes a more central interface to information.
Why This Matters Now
This moment matters because it sets the context. Grounding is becoming a foundational layer of the AI ecosystem – the connective tissue between generative models and the world’s information. As that layer becomes more important, transparency and collaboration with the web community matter more, not less.
Our goal is to keep strengthening this infrastructure while giving publishers clearer insight into how their content participates in AI-driven experiences, and how they can benefit from it.
There is much more coming in the months ahead. Stay tuned.
Jordi Ribas
Corporate Vice President, Search & AI