Bing has announced today the inclusion of Generative AI Captions which are designed to improve user search and make their browsing experience more efficient. Generative AI Captions will help searchers using Bing better understand the content of the pages they are viewing in the search index, helping to make the results more relevant and informative, leading to a quicker way to find the websites they are after.
Using GPT 4, generative captions help to analyze a search query and extract the most important content from the results pages, providing easy to understand summaries for users. Generative AI Captions will be different for each search query and may also alter the exact wording of the individual websites in the search results, but Bing has stated that the signals and techniques used for the new Generative AI captions will help to guarantee the overall quality and precision of the generated text.
How to Prevent Generative Captions on Your Website
Bing has also ensured a method for webmasters to prevent the use of Generative Captions on their websites if they do not want to have AI summarized versions of their webpages. The use of NOCACHE or NOARCHIVE tags will give developers more control over how their pages are displayed in the Bing search index. Bing has specified further that the use of these tags will also influence your site showing up in Bing Chat as well:
- Content without the NOCACHE tag and also the NOARCHIVE tag may be featured in Bing Chat responses, leveraging Microsoft’s capability to provide more useful answers and enhance your ranking potential in Bing Chat. Additionally, your site content may be utilized to train their generative AI foundation models.
- For content labeled with the NOCACHE tag, it may be incorporated into Bing Chat responses, featuring only the URL, snippet, and title in the answer. Moving forward, any content marked as NOCACHE in our Bing Index will exclusively use URLs, titles, and snippets for training Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- Bing Chat responses will exclude content tagged as NOARCHIVE and refrain from providing links to such content. In the future, for material in the Bing Index labeled as NOARCHIVE, Microsoft will abstain from utilizing the content for the training of Microsoft’s generative AI foundation models.
- Finally if content has both NOCACHE and NOARCHIVE tags, Microsoft will treat it as NOCACHE.
Here is how you can set up your website specifying how you want it indexed or used in the training of AI models:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive, nocache">
Alternatively, webmasters have the option to explicitly instruct Bing to handle the content with the NOCACHE directive:
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> <meta name="bingbot" content="nocache">
Bing is also continuing to respect the use of MAXSNIPPET and NOSNIPPET metatags:
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:[number]">
This helps webmasters specify the maximum text-length, in characters, of a snippet in search results. If value = 0, a text snippet will not be displayed. You can also use NOSNIPPET to not display a text snippet:
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
When conflicting robots (googlebot, bingbot, etc.) meta tags are present, the more restrictive tag takes precedence. For instance, if a page includes both the max-snippet:50 and nosnippet tags, the nosnippet tag will be applied.
Leveraging AI captions can significantly enhance your online presence by ensuring that the content displayed in search results and Bing Chat accurately reflects your website. Our team of web developers can help you to set up and fine-tune AI captions effectively, ensuring that the information displayed in the search results aligns seamlessly with your website’s objectives.
