Microsoft will retire the legacy SOAP and POX Bing Webmaster Tools APIs on August 31, 2026, according to a reminder Microsoft’s Krishna Madhavan posted on LinkedIn and X. Search Engine Roundtable reported the deadline on Monday, August 3. Any integration still calling the old SOAP or POX endpoints after August 31, 2026 stops returning data that day. Microsoft’s notice describes no grace period and no fallback to the old wire format once the cutoff passes.
The fix is not a rebuild. Microsoft says the JSON over HTTP REST API carries “identical functionality” to the legacy versions, so the change touches only the request format, not what the API can do. The same API key works without reissuance, and quotas, rate limits and permissions carry over unchanged. Teams need to migrate the request shape, not rebuild the integration’s scope. Any agency or in-house team with a reporting dashboard, rank tracker, or crawl tool still wired to the SOAP or POX endpoints should treat this as a scheduled task, not a background item, because the failure mode on September 1 is a silent data gap rather than an error someone notices immediately.
Bing Webmaster Tools has a second, unrelated development from the same week. Its performance reports ship with no native filter box: to isolate one page or one query, a user exports the report and filters it elsewhere, then rebuilds the view in a spreadsheet or a business intelligence tool. That workflow is common enough among agencies managing multiple Bing properties that it amounts to a recurring manual step every reporting cycle. SEO consultant Lily Ray raised the gap directly with Microsoft on X on July 31, writing, “please add page-level filtering to queries/keywords in Bing Webmaster Tools!”
Microsoft’s Krishna Madhavan replied the same day: “thank you for the request. Ack. We will work on it :)” That is an acknowledgment, not a shipped feature or a committed date. Microsoft gave no timeline for when, or whether, page-level filtering reaches the reporting interface. Google Search Console has offered this kind of filtering for years, so Bing is closing a gap competitors already closed rather than introducing something new. The reply establishes that the request reached the right person inside Microsoft. It does not establish when, or whether, engineering resources get assigned to build it.
Two Bing Webmaster Tools stories broke the same week: one closing out a legacy API, one opening a feature request. Together they read as routine maintenance and catch-up rather than neglect, a reasonable signal that Microsoft is still investing in the platform rather than letting it stagnate. Only one of the two carries an actual date. Search teams still calling the SOAP or POX endpoints should schedule the REST migration now, well ahead of August 31; teams waiting on page-level filtering should keep exporting and filtering manually, because “we will work on it” is not a roadmap entry and carries no committed ship date.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported both items on August 3, 2026.
