Microsoft unveiled 'Web IQ', a search engine dedicated to AI agents, at the Build 2026 conference.

CNET reported that Web IQ is a search engine for AI agents rather than people. While existing search engines rank results in a way suited to people, Web IQ provides results in a compressed format that lets AI agents understand them quickly while using as few tokens as possible.

Jordi Ribas (조르디 리바스), corporate vice president of Search and AI at Microsoft, said, "Based on 20 years of accumulated Bing technology, we redesigned it from scratch as a search engine optimized for agents."

Microsoft stressed that Web IQ returns results within 165 milliseconds in 95 percent of cases, about 2.5 times faster than competing products. It added that Web IQ has already been applied to Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT for a considerable period.

Ribas forecast that the number of AI agent searches will surpass human searches within this year. He said agents run searches multiple times even for a single chat response, so search volume will naturally exceed that of people. He said he does not agree with predictions that AI will make 1,000 times more searches than people within a few years, but his view is that agent search volume surpassing human search volume is certain.