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AI applications are only as good as the information they reason from. Microsoft Web IQ is a suite of AI-native APIs that gives applications access to fresh, real-world intelligence from across the web.
Web IQ returns ranked, citation-ready context designed for direct use in a large language model's context window. It builds on decades of search infrastructure and is designed for large language models, multi-step agents, and production AI workloads.
Note
Web IQ requires a paid Azure subscription. Azure credits don't work for Web IQ. To get started, deploy Web IQ with the Azure portal.
Key concepts
- Web IQ resource: the Azure resource you create in your Azure subscription. Web IQ usage is metered and billed to your subscription through it. It isn't in the request path: your application calls
api.microsoft.aidirectly. - Web IQ AppID: your application's identity in Web IQ, created when you connect a Web IQ resource in the Web IQ portal. The AppID sets which APIs your application can call, its rate limit (15 QPS by default), its API keys, and the Entra application (client) IDs bound to it. Most customers have one resource and one AppID.
- Entra application (client) ID: the ID of your app registration in Microsoft Entra ID. You bind it to a Web IQ AppID to authenticate with Microsoft Entra tokens. See Authentication.
Why use Web IQ
| Capability | Result | Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Quality | Highest grounding satisfaction in the measured benchmark | More accurate and consistent grounded responses |
| Speed | 164-ms P95 latency | Responsive multi-step agent workflows |
| Efficiency | Fewest tokens per query in the measured benchmark | Lower reasoning time and cost per call |
Web IQ powers leading frontier AI assistants, including Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.
Content coverage
Web IQ provides citation-ready context from:
- Web pages
- News
- Images
- Video
Results are ranked and optimized for relevance, freshness, and authority. Web IQ combines the open web with licensed and specialized data sources to support high-stakes use cases.
Web IQ operates at global scale, with coverage across more than 100 languages and markets.
Integration options
Send a query by using:
- REST
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) with JSON-RPC 2.0
- An SDK
Queries can contain natural language, structured parameters, or both. Web IQ returns a structured JSON response with titles, URLs, snippets, timestamps, and provenance. The response is ready to add to a model's context window without additional post-processing.
Web IQ is model-agnostic and MCP-native, so applications aren't tied to a specific inference provider.