Microsoft Bing is testing a "Recommended by" section within its product results that displays a third-party brand's name without linking to that brand's site, and routes clicks on the product thumbnails directly to retailer pages instead.

Search industry watcher Sachin Patel spotted the test and posted about it on X and Search Engine Watch; the feature was replicable in some browsers at the time of testing. In one confirmed example, Bing product results showed the label "Recommended by GearLab" above a row of product thumbnails.

The execution raises two concrete problems, both observable in the live test.

First, the attribution carries no link. Users who see "Recommended by GearLab" cannot click through to GearLab's review or recommendation page — there is no outbound connection to the source of the recommendation from what testing showed.

Second, the product thumbnails that appear under the recommendation do not link to GearLab either. Clicking any of them takes the user straight to the retailer selling the product. The destination pages make no mention of GearLab whatsoever, so a shopper has no way to verify that GearLab actually recommended the item being displayed.

That combination — a named endorser, no link to the endorser, and destination pages that never reference the endorser — makes the trust signal effectively unverifiable for the user. As the original observer put it: "It is just weird."

What is confirmed versus what is speculation

Confirmed: Bing is surfacing a "Recommended by" label in product results in at least some browsers, and in the observed example the named recommender was GearLab. Confirmed by replication: thumbnails link to retailers, and the recommender receives no link.

Speculation: motive and lineage. Google tested a similar "recommended by" section for product results in May 2025, so this Bing experiment may be a response to that move — but there is no statement from Microsoft confirming any connection, and no confirmation that the named brands actively participated in or endorsed the placement. Microsoft has not issued public documentation on the feature.

Impact by site type

For review sites and product-testing publishers such as GearLab, the test is a double-edged design. Their brand name gains impression surface inside Bing's shopping results, potentially boosting recognition among high-intent product searchers. But the absence of a link removes the traffic benefit entirely, and an unverifiable attribution could put a publisher's name next to products it never reviewed or ranked as shown.

For retailers, the format functions as a straightforward traffic play: their product pages receive the clicks, with the recommender label serving as an implicit trust badge the shopper cannot check.

For shoppers, the feature currently obscures provenance. A user who wants to read why GearLab recommends a product — or whether it actually does — has no path from the search result to that answer.

Context and what to watch

This is a test, not a confirmed rollout, and Bing regularly runs experimental modules that never ship broadly. The feature appeared inconsistently across browsers, which is typical of Bing's bucket testing.

The Google precedent from May 2025 suggests recommendation-attributed product modules are an idea both major engines are circling, at least in experimental form.

Watch next for three signals: whether Microsoft adds a link to the recommender in subsequent versions of the module; whether the named recommenders publicly confirm or contest their inclusion; and whether Google revives and expands its own May 2025 test into a wider rollout. Any of those would indicate whether unlinked brand attribution was a bug in an early build or the intended design.