If you do some queries in Bing Search, you may get the Bing Chat box and a brief answer from Bing Chat at the top. We knew this was coming, Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Microsoft Bing said it would a week or so ago and now it seems to be here.

This shows up in all browsers, but when you try to navigate to the Bing Chat interface, it tells you that you need to be in the beta and use Microsoft Edge. If you are in the beta and using Edge, then it lets you continue your voyage.

I spotted this via David Iwanow on Twitter, he shared some screenshots there but here is a screenshot of what I see for the query [standing desk vs sitting desk]:

Here is a video of it in action:

Previously we saw Bing testing summarized from sources and thought maybe that was a hint of Bing Chat in Bing Search but no, this is different.

Glenn Gabe noted there is a setting for this as well:

Here is the difference between Bing AI chat featured snippets (just released) versus the traditional answers (w/out Bing Chat). Again, clicking any of the prompts or entering a follow-up question takes you to Bing Chat proper.

Oh, and Go Princeton (it’s where I’m located!) 🙂 pic.twitter.com/v1olmgrlsc

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 20, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.

There is some concern and speculation on the internet that Microsoft Bing is feeding in content behind paywall and using such content to provide answers in Bing Chat. I asked Bing Chat if it can give answers based on content behind paywalls and it said no, it cannot.

But I am not sure if this answer is 100% true:

Here is one thread about Bing Chat referencing and citing content behind a paywall to provide an answer for Bing Chat:

It’s a tricky minefield. If proven that these generative AIs are trained on proprietary and/or paywalled content, it opens the door to, shall we say, interesting litigation.

— Barry Adams 📰 (@badams) March 19, 2023

Now, is this possible? Well, there can be answers on why Bing was able to access this content:

(1) Maybe the content was open for a period of time where it was not behind a paywall and Bing indexed it?

(2) Maybe the content provider is giving this paywalled content to Bingbot without a paywall. There are approved ways to give paywalled content to search engines, like the old first click free and flexible sampling solutions.

So technically, the content might now be behind a paywall for users but not for search engines.

So technically, Bingbot doesn’t see the paywall but users might.

That is a possible technical explanation.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google Business Profiles lets you see what business listings offer service-wise, they’ve been doing this for a while now, and now they seem to impact your local rankings. But what is new and scary is that Google is making up pricing for your services that are almost always incorrect and sometimes dangerous for that businesses.

Carrie Hill and Sukhjit S Matharu spotted this and posted a couple of examples, one from a client and one from some random business. In both cases, the pricing Google listed are incorrect. She said her client is not offering these services for free, despite what Google says. And her client’s competitors are not offering bed bug inspection for only $1 and $100.

Here is what Sukhjit S Matharu shared on Twitter, saying “when looking into a client’s services in their GBP, we noticed that some of the predefined services had a “free” label which we nor the client added.”

Here is what Carrie Hill shared on Twitter saying “Here’s another where pricing is arbitrarily added in – not from the client… certainly not correct!”

Joy Hawkins, a local SEO, also confirmed this is new.

I wonder if this is easy for the business to fix by going into their Google Business Profiles and editing their services. But I suspect most of these businesses have no clue Google added these prices to their services and it might lead to some bad reviews if a customer is charged or quoted more than what is listed in Google Search.

This reminds me when Google Local Service Ads estimated pricing, which upset many businesses.

Forum discussion at Twitter.