Bing Chat launch (the new Bing)
Microsoft rebuilt Bing around an OpenAI-powered chat experience, the first generative answer layer shipped by a major search engine.
What changed
On 7 February 2023 Microsoft launched a substantially rewritten Bing that paired conventional results with a GPT-based chat assistant capable of synthesising answers with citations. Access was initially waitlisted and moved to open preview on 4 May 2023. For publishers it introduced the first mainstream search interface where an engine answered directly from crawled content, with link attribution rather than blue links as the primary route to a site. Microsoft later rebranded the experience as Copilot.
Timing
Rollout began 7 February 2023. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.