A year on the Microsoft Advertising API: SOAP is dying, the window is open

On the first of April this year, Microsoft published a blog post announcing the end of its SOAP API. I checked the date twice, because burying a protocol funeral in an April 1 post is asking for trouble. It was real. New features stop shipping to SOAP on October 1, 2026, and on January 31, 2027 the whole thing switches off.

Then I did what twenty years in PPC have drilled into me. I opened our codebase at Lynt and checked which connectors still speak SOAP to Bing. Not because the deadline is close. Because an API retirement never breaks anything on the day it’s announced. It breaks a reporting job fourteen months later, mid-quarter, in an account where nobody remembers who wrote the script.

That deadline is the one hard clock in Microsoft’s API year. Everything else the platform shipped is quieter and, honestly, more interesting. Piece by piece, the Bing Ads API caught up with Google. PMax, AI Max, generative assets, Google login, richer import. I’ve spent twelve years writing code against Google’s Ads API, and for most of that time Microsoft’s was the platform you integrated last, grudgingly, if the client insisted. This is the first year where porting a Google automation to Bing costs almost nothing.

And the competition still treats Bing as an afterthought, which is exactly why the window is open. So I’ll walk the year the same way I walked Google’s. For each change, what it is, why it matters for your account, and the exact call or payload to build. Deadline first, opportunity after.

The one hard clock: SOAP is being retired

This is the only dated obligation 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 is the day new features ship in the REST API only. SOAP stops getting anything new.
• January 31, 2027 is the day 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 an expiry date. And the move is no cosmetic swap. Reporting works differently in REST, the auth flow differs, and error handling changes. A pipeline you forget about will simply stop returning data on January 31, 2027, 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 bother porting 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": ["TimePeriod","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.)

Generative assets, written by the API

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

What changed. February 2025 (SDK 13.0.24) shipped recommendation endpoints. CreateResponsiveSearchAdRecommendation, CreateAssetGroupRecommendation and CreateResponsiveAdRecommendation, each with a Refine… counterpart. July 2025 (13.0.25) added a job-based variant and brand-kit recommendations, and 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 instead of a UI-only chore. That 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 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 instead of a separate hand-built one.

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 in Campaign Management. It brings expanded query matching, asset personalization and smart URL routing, the same post-keyword trend as Google’s AI Max, and it exposes the guardrails 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 playbook transfers to Microsoft almost one for one. So does the trade. You gain reach and hand over matching and URL choice, which makes the guardrails 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 and 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.)

Porting your Google setup just got cheap

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

Why it matters for your account. What you build on Google now ports to Bing at close to one to one. With Google login you don’t even maintain a second OAuth mental model, because 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, redirect_url=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 and 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, so the port is mostly reading your own Google code. (The Google-OAuth grant classes are real SDK additions from December 2025. Confirm the exact constructor and auth flow against the release notes, because it’s an SDK helper rather than a token-endpoint grant value.)

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. We run customer-level business reporting for clients in BigQuery, and the most valuable join in it is click ID to CRM order, because a CRM join replaces platform-reported ROAS with the real number. On Google that join runs on GCLID. This report gives Bing the same seam. And the report itself is just another REST submit against the v13 Reporting endpoint, so it drops straight into the migration from 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, which means 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, and I take it seriously. We spent two years building Boostera, our tool that enriches Google Merchant Center feeds with AI, precisely because feed quality is the ceiling on every automated shopping surface. The same rule holds here. A product shows up cleanly in an AI answer only if its feed data and messaging are in order, so the unglamorous feed work is what 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 two SOAP 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.

Where I’d start tonight

Not with the whole migration. With a grep. Search your codebase for ReportingService.svc and the SOAP SDK imports, and write down every job that comes back. That list is your January 31, 2027 exposure, and it took you ten minutes.

Then pick one Google automation you’re proud of and ask what it would earn on a platform where your competitors haven’t shown up yet. The parity work is done. The window is open. Which job will you port first?

FAQ