Microsoft announced the launch of generative AI captions in Bing – an AI-powered feature designed to create more informative snippets for search engine results pages (SERPs).
For publishers and SEO professionals, this new capability presents opportunities as well as concerns.
The captions are generated by OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, which analyzes both the user’s search query and the content of webpages to create short descriptions that capture the essence of each page.
While the captions are AI-generated and may not exactly match the wording on the page, Bing says it employs various safeguards to ensure accuracy and relevance.
Microsoft states in an announcement:
“Generative Captions redefine the way searchers interact with results. By transforming web content into easily digestible snippets, we help users quickly grasp the gist of each page and find what they’re looking for faster.”
Bing’s New AI Captions: Opportunities & Concerns
With the launch of Generative AI Captions, Bing uses natural language generation to create more informative snippets for search results.
This has implications for publishers when it comes to clickthrough rates.
Instead of relying on each page’s title tags and meta descriptions, Bing analyzes queries and content to generate custom snippets.
While helpful for users, this could impact clickthrough rates for sites that previously depended on carefully written titles and descriptions to entice searchers.
If the AI captions sufficiently answer the query, fewer searchers may feel the need actually to visit the page.
On the other hand, Bing may generate new snippets considered more relevant for each query, potentially leading to more clicks.
Monitoring clickthrough rates and snippet behavior will be crucial as the technology evolves.
How To Opt-Out
For website owners, these generative snippets are opt-out. All websites are opted in by default.
You can use NOCACHE, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, or MAXSNIPPET tags to prevent your pages from having AI-generated captions. Microsoft also noted it will honor those in Bing Chat.
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