Microsoft is planning to replace the featured snippets at the top of its Bing search results page with responses from its new Bing chatbot. Mikhail Parakhin, head of web services at Microsoft said on Twitter that the company plans to replace its current feature snippets “ASAP”, with “probably even some new UI” (via Search Engine Land).

As of today, people enrolled in the Bing preview can view answers from the Bing AI right next to featured snippets at the top of the search results page. However, these two different ways to get an answer to a question can sometimes display different information.

When asked on Twitter why featured snippets on Bing sometimes had worse answers than responses from the Bing chatbot, Parakhin said that the latter “use old technology and crowdsourcing.” However, Microsoft also acknowledged that answers from its Bing AI are also not always perfect.

Yep, they use old technology and crowdsourcing, we will replace them ASAP. Probably even some new UI.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) March 11, 2023

Anyway, Microsoft may already be experimenting with putting answers from its new Bing AI, complete with footnotes and sources, at the top of search results. Earlier this month, SEO consultant Brodie Clark posted a video of this new UI on Twitter.

Whoa, looks like things are becoming more interesting on Microsoft Bing. Similar to @Neeva, Bing is now summarising content with footnotes/sources within featured snippets through AI (which it wasn’t doing previously). Source & more examples: https://t.co/PHP4Shy6cF pic.twitter.com/BdXKvExpgW

— SERP Alert (@SERPalerts) March 1, 2023

Even though responses from the Bing chatbot do include links to sources in footnotes, this may eventually raise some questions for publishers competing to rank at the top of the search results page. Bing recently crossed 100 million daily active users after Microsoft introduced these new ChatGPT-like capabilities to its search engine, though all things considered, it still has a tiny market share compared to Google.