The Microsoft Advertising API year — SOAP is dying, and here's the REST call to build instead

The whole year in one sentence

One change has a clock on it — Microsoft is retiring its SOAP API, with new features going REST-only on October 1, 2026 and SOAP switched off completely on January 31, 2027 — and everything else is Microsoft quietly reaching feature parity with Google, which makes 2026 the moment to start automating over Bing while almost nobody else does. If you have any script, connector or reporting job built on the SOAP SDK, you have roughly a year and a concrete rebuild to schedule. The rest is upside you adopt when you choose.

I’ll take each change the same way: what changed, why it matters for your account, and the exact call or payload to build — deadline first, opportunity after. The reason 2026 is the right time isn’t hype: the API can finally do what Google’s does — PMax, AI Max, generative assets, New Customer Acquisition, Google login and import — and the competition still treats Bing as an afterthought. The window is open precisely because they aren’t here yet.

But one change comes with a date attached. Start there.

Deadline — SOAP is being retired, REST is the only path

This is the only hard clock of the Microsoft year, so it goes first.

What changed. On April 1, 2026, Microsoft announced a hard timeline to move the Advertising API off SOAP and onto REST. Two dates matter:

• October 1, 2026 — new features ship in the REST API only. SOAP stops getting anything new.
• January 31, 2027 — SOAP is switched off completely. Existing SOAP integrations run until then, and not a day after.

The PPC.land and ALM Corp write-ups both confirm the same dates.

Why it matters for your account. If any reporting job, bid script or connector touches Bing through the SOAP SDK, it has a hard expiry. And it isn’t a cosmetic swap — reporting works differently in REST, the auth flow differs, and error handling changes. A reporting pipeline you forget about will simply stop returning data on January 31, 2027, mid-quarter, with no warning beyond a blog post from ten months earlier.

What to do. If your Bing tooling is thin or non-existent, don’t port the old SOAP code — build REST-first and skip a generation. REST is plain HTTP and JSON: a report goes from a SOAP envelope to a JSON POST against the Reporting endpoint, with an OAuth bearer token and your developer token in the headers:

# OLD: SOAP envelope to ReportingService.svc (off on 2027-01-31)
#   <s:Envelope><s:Body><SubmitGenerateReport>...</SubmitGenerateReport></s:Body></s:Envelope>

# NEW: REST — submit a report request as JSON
curl -X POST \
  "https://reporting.api.bingads.microsoft.com/Reporting/v13/GenerateReport/Submit" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OAUTH_TOKEN" \
  -H "DeveloperToken: $DEV_TOKEN" \
  -H "CustomerAccountId: $ACCOUNT_ID" -H "CustomerId: $CUSTOMER_ID" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "ReportRequest": { "Type": "CampaignPerformanceReportRequest",
        "Aggregation": "Daily", "Columns": ["CampaignName","Clicks","Spend"] } }'

(The REST host, the OAuth + DeveloperToken header model and the v13 path are from Microsoft’s docs; confirm the exact request body for your report against the release notes before you ship.)

Upside #1 — Generative AI writes your assets, via the API

With the deadline scheduled, the rest of the year is parity Google already taught you to use.

What changed. February 2025 (SDK 13.0.24) shipped recommendation endpoints — CreateResponsiveSearchAdRecommendation, CreateAssetGroupRecommendation, CreateResponsiveAdRecommendation, each with a Refine… counterpart. July 2025 (13.0.25) added a job-based variant and brand-kit recommendations; February 2026 added AutoGeneratedAssetsEnabled to RSA settings. All from the release notes.

Why it matters for your account. Ad-copy generation and iteration is now scriptable, not a UI-only chore — which is the difference between hand-writing copy for ten asset groups and generating it for hundreds.

What to do. Wire the recommendation endpoints into the same creative workflow you already run for Google — generate, refine against the brand kit, push:

feed/product → CreateResponsiveSearchAdRecommendation
            → RefineResponsiveSearchAdRecommendation (brand-kit term exclusions)
            → push to ad group  (no manual copy-paste from the UI)

Bing becomes another output channel of your existing ad-copy pipeline, not a separate hand-built one.

Upside #2 — AI Max for Search, with an API switch

What changed. AI Max for Search opened to pilot in May 2026, with the API hook AISearchSetting (Campaign Management). It brings expanded query matching, asset personalization and smart URL routing — the same post-keyword trend as Google’s AI Max — with guardrails exposed through the API: brand inclusions and exclusions, term exclusions, messaging restrictions. Search Engine Land covered the launch alongside Microsoft’s broader agentic-web push.

Why it matters for your account. If you already run a DSA-to-AI-Max migration on Google, the same playbook transfers to Microsoft almost one for one. The trade-off is identical too — you gain reach and hand over matching and URL choice, so the guardrails are the part you don’t skip.

What to do. Set AISearchSetting on the campaign and deploy your brand-kit guardrails programmatically across accounts, the way you do on Google:

{
  "AISearchSetting": { "Enabled": true },
  "BrandKit": {
    "TermExclusions": ["competitor-name", "off-brand-claim"],
    "MessagingRestrictions": ["no superlatives without proof"]
  }
}

(AISearchSetting and the brand-kit exclusions are real Campaign Management additions from March/May 2026; the exact object nesting is illustrative — AI Max is still a pilot, so confirm the schema and GA status in the release notes right before you build against it.)

Upside #3 — Convergence with Google makes porting cheap

The clearest theme of the year: Microsoft made it cheap to bring your Google setup over.

Why it matters for your account. “What you do on Google, you can now port to Bing at close to 1:1” — and with Google login, you don’t even maintain a second OAuth mental model. The same Google identity authenticates both:

# Authenticate the MICROSOFT API with your existing Google identity (Dec 2025+).
# GoogleOAuthWebAuthCodeGrant is a Bing Ads SDK auth class — not a raw grant_type.
from bingads.authorization import GoogleOAuthWebAuthCodeGrant

authentication = GoogleOAuthWebAuthCodeGrant(
    client_id=CLIENT_ID, client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET, redirection_uri=REDIRECT_URI,
)
# one OAuth flow across Google Ads + Microsoft Advertising;
# a March 2026 fix preserves the Google refresh token between runs.

What to do. Pick the single Google job with the highest payoff — NCA goals or generative assets are the usual first picks — and port it to Bing as a pilot. The auth and import work is already done for you; you’re reusing patterns, not reinventing them. (The Google-OAuth grant classes are real SDK additions from December 2025; confirm the exact constructor and auth flow against the release notes — it’s an SDK helper, not a token-endpoint grant value.)

Upside #4 — Measurement grew up

Three upgrades make Bing data finally easy to wire into your own BI and CRM:

Why it matters for your account. MSClickIdPerformanceReport is the one to reach for first: stitch MSCLKID to your CRM orders and you get true ROAS instead of platform-reported numbers — the same join you already run for Google’s GCLID. The shape of the report is just another REST submit against the v13 Reporting endpoint, so it drops straight into the migration you’re already doing in the first section.

Shopping, meanwhile, has quietly consolidated: the legacy Content API v9.1 is effectively frozen (last change in 2024). Modern Microsoft Shopping runs through Microsoft Merchant Center plus Bing Ads v13 — PMax asset groups, listing-group paths and the FeedItemPerformanceReport.

On the horizon — ads inside the chatbot

The most forward-looking thread is Microsoft’s bet on agentic commerce. At Activate 2026 it rolled out Copilot Checkout — buying directly inside the chat — alongside Brand Agents for Shopify and ad placements beneath Copilot’s conversational answers, with Performance Max surfacing under those results. The marketing commentary frames it as Microsoft going “AI-first” — a genuinely new shopping surface rather than another ad slot.

For now this is more “watch this space” than “automate today,” but it has a concrete prerequisite: feed and brand-kit hygiene. Products only show up cleanly in an AI surface if their feed data and messaging are in order — so the unglamorous work positions a store for the conversational channel. On the creative side, the year also shipped HTML5 assets via the API (AddHTML5s, March 2026) and Video Animation (static image to video asset, November 2025) — cheap ways to feed richer formats without a production team.

The year on one timeline

Every v13 entry below comes from the Bing Ads API release notes (last updated June 5, 2026); the platform announcements from the Microsoft Advertising blog. The only hard deadlines are the SOAP retirement’s two dates (flagged HARD); the EU political-ads row is a compliance obligation, and everything else is opt-in upside — the right-hand column tells you which is which.

[HARD Oct 1]  1. Audit auth/connector → plan the REST rebuild
[HARD Jan 31] 2. Build REST-first → skip the SOAP port entirely
[parity]      3. Port one Google job → NCA or generative assets
[pilot]       4. AISearchSetting → deploy brand-kit guardrails
[measure]     5. MSClickId + offline conversions → into your BI

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