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Melt-your-heart four-doors don't come along very often. Mazda deserves a chorus of huzzahs! here. But this sweetheart of Hiroshima is not all kansei, as we shall see.

The 929's exterior dimensions are almost identical to those of the Acura Legend, yet its passenger compartment measures fractionally larger in most seat­ing dimensions. Its trunk is quite small, however, only twelve cubic feet, compared with fifteen for the Legend. The 929's trunk shape is thoroughly useful though, and Mazda has shrewdly designed trunk hinges that never bite into cargo space (the new BMW 325i has similar hinges). Still, the skimpy size counts as the first lapse in this beautiful car.

Although one of our long-legged driv­ers complained of bumping his knees on the nonadjustable steering column during the rigors and vigors of track testing, the driving position generally earns high marks. Particularly agreeable is the way the dead pedal and the accelerator are placed so your legs take symmetrical positions. The seats, both front and rear, are quite enveloping, which adds a feeling of intimacy (and lateral support). What the rear-seat space lacks in vastness is nicely offset by a sense of opulence, from the smooth leather, from the voluptuous shapes, and from the padding you feel down where your instep pushes under the front seat. Most cars are hard down there.

There is always the feeling, particularly from inside, that this car is extravagantly dressed. Part of that surely owes to the lav­ish contours of the dash, the door panels and even the headrests, and part owes to the jewelry-like details: the bright-metal door handles and shifter, the bright little dots punctuating the sweeps of the instru­ment needles, and the almost imperceptible hairline of chrome on the needles themselves. This beauty looks to have taken a long time dressing and making up before she went out.

HIGHS: Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

Has too much been given over to the look? The highly contoured dash leaves little room for vents, so little that the outer ones have been moved to the door armrest to find space, and those remaining, although artfully shaped, are quite small. We drove in times too temperate to test the climate control. On Sunbelt summer days, though, high-level flow from the air con­ditioner would surely be limited.

The well-dressed aura of the 929 is backed up by the standard-equipment list, which includes both driver and passenger air bags, automatic transmission, auto­matic climate control, and cruise control. The right-side air bag uses all the space normally available for a glove box, leaving only a small compartment beneath the console armrest for stashing stuff.

The 929 is well-dressed in technology, too. The electronically controlled transmis­sion decides how sportily to shift by sensing how heartily you tromp on the gas pedal. By stepping down smartly, we could raise the automatic upshift point to 6100 rpm (the redline is 6500).

The computer also decides when the intake manifold should change its tuning length from long (high torque) to short (high power) and how the exhaust system should configure itself for the sportiest sound—above 3400 rpm it automatically acts like a dual system to reduce back pressure for best power. Frankly, our impression of the 929 is that it's a quiet car: the exhaust sound never drew notice.

LOWS: Hair-trigger controls, skimpy trunk, frenzied sound at cruise.

And yet, the car does make a sound that should be mentioned. Although the 929 proved very quiet on the test meter­—only 68 dBA at 70-mph cruise—what sound there is has a frenetic quality, a fast tempo, perhaps because the engine turns nearly 3000 rpm at 70 mph. So cruising in the 929 is not as relaxed as you might expect at this price.

Now we're getting into the area of beautiful but. The 929 has a few off-­putting ways. The steering's response is unfriendly. At normal road speeds, it's hyperquick off center, such that an unex­pectedly large heading change is made as soon as you apply turning force. And on gentle curves of the sort you find on the Interstate—on which you should be able to set up a smooth arc and hold it—the test car required constant steering. It felt as though the steering effort was subtly changing, as though being manipulated by some maverick variable-effort system. We have felt that same problem in a few other cars that were too high-tech for their own good. Probably an owner wouldn't notice it, except to say, "Yeah, now that you mention it, I seem to be steering a lot."

Perhaps more bothersome is the hair­-trigger accelerator. This car jerks for­ward—or backward—unless great concentration is applied to tipping into the power.

Mazda has the 929 on a diet that includes an aluminum hood, light bumpers, and hollow anti-roll bars, yet the scales show 3682 pounds. Track performance is fine—quarter-mile acceler­ation in 16.6 seconds at 84 mph with an automatic demonstrates that the engine is not overburdened by the weight. On the skidpad, 0.79 g shows the tires can cope with it, too.

VERDICT: Still gorgeous.

Which brings us to the driver, doesn't it? Living with a beauty often requires a little extra effort. We notice the 929's quirks—that, after all, is the business were in—but most of the time we're thinking like normal car guys: man, just look at it!

Counterpoints

When shopping for a new mid-luxury $30,000 sedan, don't take your brother-­in-law who knows all about cars. Take your artsy cousin the interior decorator, because these cars are all about style. The new Lexus ES300, the Acura Le­gend, and probably the new Infiniti J30 will each carry you down the road qui­etly and smoothly and run like Swiss watches. The choice will boil down to which car best fits your personal decor. If yours is the retro, art-deco motif, buy the 929. The fan-shaped stitching on its leather seats resembles period wall sconces, and the gauges are adorned with tiny chromed jewels and set in a curved fascia. There is no wood, and sparse accents of chrome seem to whis­per "Waldorf-Astoria."

Outside, the look is fluid and volup­tuous. But right-brained types will notice that function is far removed from these lovely forms in a few places, like the small trunk, the nonex­istent glove compartment, and the poorly shaped and located air vents. I, for one, am endeavoring to encourage my left brain. I'll take the 929. — Frank Markus

Four things gall me so badly about the 929 that my canines drip foam: First, I don't fit behind the steering wheel. My legs are too long (I'm six-foot-two). Funny thing is, this presents no prob­lem in some smaller cars—Saturns and other GM compacts, for example, or Tauruses. But no matter where I put the seat, I can't steer the 929 without bang­ing my knuckles into my knees. Lexus, lnfiniti, and Acura each solves the problem by adding a movable steering wheel. For the record, I don't fit very well in a Nissan 300ZX or a Dodge Stealth, either. But the 929 is supposed to be a roomy sedan.

Second, I prefer to drive without a fan blowing at me. The 929's auto­matic climate control is nearly impos­sible to use without the fan on. Third, the throttle pedal's off-the-line jumpiness inhibits smooth starts. And fourth, while reaching for the track button on the CD player, your wrist often trips the switch on the shifter that drops the transmission out of overdrive and into third. There. Shoot me. —Phil Berg

The new 929 is one of those cars that can captivate by looks alone. The Lexus LS400 should have a body this good. Yet the Lexus doesn't suffer from the 929's blemishes. For a car this big, the 929 has an amazingly poor driving position. Set the seat so your legs are comfortable and the steering wheel is too far away. Move the seat forward and you'll crush your legs against the wheel.

Far more troubling, though, is the 929's ill-mannered gas pedal. For one thing, the throttle is stiff—you have to push it hard to get the engine moving. Worse, the pedal's progress isn't lin­ear—as you press into it, the effort sud­denly lightens. The result is too much throttle and a jerky start off the line. More often than not, the abrupt accel­eration causes a hiccup from the auto­matic transmission. As a result, driving the 929 smoothly away from a stop requires tremendous effort.

"Tremendous effort" shouldn't have to be mentioned anywhere near a $30,000 luxury sedan. —Arthur St. Antoine

Specifications

Specifications

1992 Mazda 929
Vehicle Type: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 4-door sedan

PRICE
Base/As Tested: $28,150/$32,035

ENGINE
DOHC 24-valve V-6, iron block and aluminum heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 180 in3, 2954 cm3
Power: 195 hp @ 5750 rpm
Torque: 200 lb-ft @ 3500 rpm 

TRANSMISSION
4-speed automatic

CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: multilink/multilink
Brakes, F/R: 10.8-in vented disc/11.3-in vented disc
Tires: Michelin MXV4
P205/65R-15

DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 112.2 in
Length: 193.7 in
Width: 70.7 in
Height: 54.9 in
Passenger Volume, F/R: 53/44 ft3
Trunk Volume: 12 ft3
Curb Weight: 3682 lb

C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 8.5 sec
1/4-Mile: 16.6 sec @ 84 mph
100 mph: 24.0 sec
120 mph: 49.0 sec
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 8.7 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 4.3 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 5.8 sec
Top Speed: 132 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 180 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.79 g

Interior Sound
Idle: 40 dBA
Full Throttle: 75 dBA
70-mph Cruising: 68 dBA

C/D FUEL ECONOMY
Observed: 20 mpg

EPA FUEL ECONOMY
City/Highway: 19/24 mpg 

C/D TESTING EXPLAINED %!s()

The Split Stopped Being A Thesis And Became A Navigation Menu

For a couple of years, the claim that human search and AI answering are two different problems has had to be carried on logic alone. It does not have to be carried that way anymore, because an index owner has put it in the product. Bing Webmaster Tools now holds two separate reports. Search Performance is still there, reporting clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position the way it always has. Beside it sits AI Performance, which Microsoft launched in public preview in February, extended in March with grounding-query-to-page mapping, and expanded again in June with a Citation Share metric, still in preview, that reports your share of citations for a given grounding query alongside the raw counts. Microsoft framed that second report, in its own words, as separating AI citations from traditional search, and framed this month’s additions as expanding first-party reporting. Two reports, two definitions of doing well, one tool.

Web IQ is the infrastructure that makes the second report mean something. It is a suite of grounding APIs built on the Bing index but re-architected end-to-end to serve agents rather than people, and instead of returning ranked documents, it returns passage-level evidence objects and structured context. Jordi Ribas, who runs Search and AI at Microsoft, put the framing plainly: Bing was built for humans, and the next era of search is for agents, with some estimates Microsoft cites suggesting agents may generate on the order of a thousand times more queries than all human search combined within a few years. Microsoft says Web IQ already powers grounding in both Copilot and ChatGPT, that it is model-agnostic and speaks MCP natively, and that it runs at a 164-millisecond P95 latency it describes as roughly two and a half times faster than the nearest alternative. It scores retrieved passages on a metric it calls GDSAT, grounding satisfaction, across completeness, freshness, and authority. Take the performance figures as the vendor claims they are and verify them against your own use if they ever bear on a decision. The line beneath all of them is the one that matters most, and it comes from the index owner directly: What makes a page rank well for a human is not the same as what makes a passage useful to an AI. That is the rank-to-citation delta, stated by the company that owns the index. Web IQ itself remains in limited access by invitation, with no general availability and no published pricing, so the product is a signal of direction more than something most teams can build on today. The direction is the point. And part of that point is that Bing Webmaster Tools is in front again.

The Question The Second Dashboard Quietly Raises Is Who Is Doing The Telling

Here is the part you should pay attention to, because it is not the part already in circulation. A platform reporting on its own surfaces is doing something useful, and Microsoft’s version of it is the best publisher-facing citation reporting that exists right now. It reports on Microsoft’s house, across Copilot, Bing’s AI answers, and a set of partner integrations, using Microsoft’s definitions of what counts and Microsoft’s decisions about what to surface. And as everyone already knows, a platform only ever tells you about its own house. Google is now doing its own version of this, rolling out a separate Generative AI report in Search Console that shows impressions and the pages surfaced in its AI features, though not clicks, and only for its own answer surfaces. Bottom line here is each company is pointing in a different direction through their actions, but each remains aligned with their own plans, goals, and objectives, as expected.

What does not get said clearly enough is that this is not a coverage gap that closes with the next release. Watch what shipped this month at Bing. Citation Share, Intents, Topics, and Compare all make the first-party view richer and more useful, and every one of them makes it richer about Microsoft’s own surfaces. The instrument is improving, but the boundary it reports inside is not moving. That is the tell that the distance between first-party revelation and third-party collection is structural rather than temporary. The two are different instruments doing different jobs. First-party reporting gives you what one platform saw on its own surfaces, at a fidelity no outsider can match, bounded by that platform’s incentives about what to reveal. Third-party measurement gives you what the field looks like from outside, across many answer surfaces, held to one method so the numbers compare to each other. Neither is the only truth. They answer different questions, for the same reason the recent argument held that you cannot lay rank and citation side by side and read them as one measurement. The conflation to avoid this week sits one level up: Do not mistake the view from inside one platform for the view of the field. Most won’t, but some still do. And if you wait thinking a single unified view will emerge, it won’t. That’s our past, not our future.

So The Work Changes Shape

Start with how your content is built to be read, because passages (chunks) are the unit now, not pages. Web IQ returns passages and scores them on completeness, freshness, and authority independent of where the page sits in any ranking, which means a page can rank perfectly well and still have its individual sections passed over because they do not stand on their own or because they add nothing a fresher source already supplies. Read your most important pages the way a passage selector would, one section at a time, and ask of each one whether it survives being lifted out of the page and dropped into an answer with no surrounding context. A paragraph that opens with “this approach” or “as noted above” fails that test, because the referent is gone the moment the passage is extracted. A section that front-loads its claim and then supports it survives. The work is unglamorous: make each section self-contained, name the entity rather than leaning on a pronoun three sentences after you last used it, put the answer near the top of the block rather than burying it under throat-clearing, and make sure the passage carries something a dozen other sources have not already said better. None of that is new advice in spirit. What is new is that a system is now scoring it directly, section by section, and acting on the score.

To make those three GDSAT dimensions usable rather than abstract, define them the way the grounding system treats them.

• Completeness asks whether a passage carries enough of the relevant information to support a claim on its own, rather than gesturing at an answer the reader has to assemble from elsewhere.
• Freshness asks whether the information is current enough to be trusted at the moment the answer is generated, which matters more in grounding than in ranking, because a stale page ranks lower while a stale fact grounds wrong.
• Authority asks whether the source is credible and attributable enough that an AI system can responsibly stand behind what it lifts.

A page can clear all three for search and still fail one for grounding, which is exactly why the two scores diverge. Microsoft’s own breakdown of how evidence quality gets judged, in its evolving role of the index post, is the clearest public reference if you want to go deeper.

Then look at access, and look carefully, because this is the part that hides in familiar territory. Web IQ inherits Bing’s existing robots.txt compliance and publisher controls and introduces no new crawler user-agent, which means your current BingBot configuration is what governs whether Web IQ can reach you at all. A directive you set years ago to protect crawl budget, or to keep a section out of the index for reasons that made sense at the time, may now be quietly deciding your eligibility to be used as evidence inside an answer. Pull your logs, confirm what BingBot is actually fetching against what you intend to expose, and separate the three questions you are really asking: whether you are being crawled, whether you are being indexed, and whether you are being grounded. They are not the same question, and a page can pass the first two and still be invisible to the third. The teams that get caught out here are usually the ones who assume access settings are solved because they were solved for search.

Harder, now that the first-party data is this good, is the discipline of not reading your AI visibility off a single screen. Citation Share gives you a clean relative number for how often Microsoft’s surfaces cite you against everyone else cited for the same grounding query, and a clean number is exactly the kind of thing that gets pasted into a deck and treated as the answer. Resist that. The number is real, and it is Microsoft’s. It says nothing about whether ChatGPT reached for you on the same question, whether Gemini did, or whether Perplexity did, and the fact that Web IQ infrastructure sits under ChatGPT’s grounding does not mean Microsoft’s dashboard reports ChatGPT’s citations back to you. It doesn’t. Treat any single first-party dashboard as one instrument on the bench rather than the readout, and check presence across more than one engine before you draw a conclusion about how you are doing, because the surface that hands you the cleanest number is not the only surface forming answers about you.

The last move ties the first three to something you can manage over time. Treat the distance between where you rank and where you get cited as a number you track on purpose, not an assumption you carry forward from quarter to quarter. The delta is the signal. When rank and citation move together, the page-level work is carrying into the answer, and your instincts about that page are sound. When they pull apart, something about how your content is being read as evidence has shifted, and you want to catch that as a measured change rather than reconstruct it after the traffic has already moved and someone is asking why. Run the comparison on a regular cadence, on the queries that actually matter to the business rather than the full vanity list, and watch the direction of travel more than any single reading. A gap that is widening tells you more than a gap that is merely large.

None of these points to a particular product. It points to a habit. First-party reporting will keep getting better, and you should use every bit of it, because no outsider sees a platform’s own surfaces as clearly as the platform does. But the reading that spans surfaces, holds to one consistent method, and owes nothing to one platform’s incentives is the one that tells you where you actually stand across the field rather than inside one house. Third-party measurement has quietly become robust enough to carry that weight, and learning to read it well is worth more than any single number on any single screen. The index owner just confirmed, from the inside, that ranking and citation are different things; that traditional search and AI responses have different units of value. Acting on that confirmation means measuring the gap from the outside, where the view is wider.

If you have run that comparison between where you rank and where you get cited and watched the two refuse to line up, I would like to know what you are seeing in your own data. Leave a comment, or reach out directly.

Much of how I think about staying visible, trusted, and chosen as this layer hardens into infrastructure is in my book, The Machine Layer.

More Resources:

• Google AI Overview Citations From Top-Ranking Pages Drop Sharply
• Data Shows AI Citation Patterns Reveal Strategic SEO Opportunities
• Microsoft Web IQ Gives AI Agents Bing Grounding APIs

This post was originally published on Duane Forrester Decodes.

Featured Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock; Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal %!s()

"The 1.0 update focuses on the Deep North biome," Iron Gate wrote in an FAQ about the switch from early access to full release. "There is some new content for the rest of Valheim as well, but nothing that is specifically focused on the Oceans." Cue a smattering of grumbling over on the game's subreddit from folks who think such a key biome for a sea-focused civilisation could do with a sprucing up it may never get.

Further to that last point, Iron Gate made clear elsewhere in the FAQ that as of right now, they're not committing to any plans in terms of whether they'll make new content additions to Valheim once 1.0 hits or how long they'll keep updating it. "We will continue to improve the game with bugfixes and quality of life stuff, though for exactly how long the game will continue to receive updates is currently too soon to say," they put it. "Likewise, it is too soon to say whether or not there will be more content added to the game in the future."

Meanwhile, if you're hoping the update'll make the game run more smoothly, the studio had the following to say:

While 1.0 includes optimisations to some areas of the game, large builds in particular would not be highly impacted by these changes. We do however plan to continue working on making the game run even smoother after 1.0. Some of the optimisations that will make it into 1.0, however, include decreasing the microstutters that occur when loading new zones in and out of memory, faster saving, and many other minor optimisations here and there.

Finally, Iron Gate confirmed that as of 1.0, Valheim's price will rise to $29.99 or the regional equivalent, with those who already own the early access version simply updating for free. Given the game's currently 50% off in the Steam summer sale for £7.74 / $9.99 / €9.99, grabbing it now if you've got the means and know you'll be interested in playing the 1.0 version seems a shrewd move. %!s()