Bing Pros & Cons: What Nobody Tells You [2026]

Yes, Bing's Copilot Search and AI features are completely free with no subscription required. Microsoft offers Copilot at no cost as part of its strategy to grow Bing's search market share against Google. Free users get access to GPT-4-class conversational answers, DALL-E-powered Image Creator, and Sora-powered Video Creator, though daily generation limits apply for media tools. Paid Copilot Pro ($20/month) adds priority access during peak times and integration with Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel.

Bing's Copilot Search sits between Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity in capability and approach. Compared to Google, Bing offers more in-depth conversational responses and bundled AI image/video generation, while Google has a larger and often more relevant web index. Compared to Perplexity Pro ($20/month), Bing is free and includes generative media creation, but Perplexity offers cleaner answer formatting, deeper research modes, and access to multiple LLMs including Claude and GPT-5. Power users typically choose Perplexity for research and Bing for everyday search plus free media generation.

Microsoft Rewards is a loyalty program that pays users in points for using Bing search, Microsoft Edge, and other Microsoft services. Users earn approximately 5 points per search (capped at 150 points/day on desktop and 100/day on mobile), and points can be redeemed for gift cards, sweepstakes entries, charity donations, or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. It's one of the few search engines that directly compensates users for searching, making it popular among users who want to monetize their search activity. Sign-up is free with any Microsoft account.

Bing's Image Creator generates images using OpenAI's DALL-E 3 model, and Microsoft's terms allow personal and commercial use of generated images, with some restrictions. Users retain rights to images they create, but the images cannot be used in ways that violate Microsoft's content policy, infringe on intellectual property, or generate copyrighted characters and trademarks. Free users get 15 fast generations per day with priority queue access, after which generations are slower but still unlimited. For high-volume commercial use, Microsoft recommends Azure OpenAI Service with explicit commercial licensing.

Yes, Bing collects search queries, IP addresses, location data, and usage patterns to improve search relevance, train AI models, and serve targeted ads, similar to Google. Users can manage privacy settings through the Microsoft Privacy Dashboard, where search history can be viewed and deleted. Bing offers a Strict tracking prevention mode in Microsoft Edge and supports Do Not Track signals. For maximum privacy, users seeking anonymized AI search should consider DuckDuckGo's AI assistant or Brave Search, which do not log personal queries.