With the increasing integration of PV generation in AC microgrids, it is challenging to keep the stability of system frequency due to the intermittent and stochastic nature of PVs. Thus, in order to reduce the investment and maintenance costs of storage systems, the electric utility has shown increasing interest in calling on PVs to provide frequency regulation services. In this paper, a novel sliding mode control (SMC) based adaptive power point tracking (APPT) control strategy is proposed to provide bi-directional primary frequency regulation (BPFR) of an AC microgrid. In this strategy, in order to restrain the variation of frequency, the sliding mode surface is adaptively regulated to provide an adaptive power reserve. Thus, the PVs will have a power headroom to regulate the frequency both up and down through releasing the reserved power or increasing the reserves of the PV systems. Furthermore, the sliding mode surface is adaptively regulated only based on the locally measured frequency of the microgrid without the requirements of communication, detailed PV model, irradiance sensors as well as MPP estimators. Thus, the proposed control strategy shows the advantages of easy to implement and reduces the investment and maintenance costs of installing storage systems or irradiance sensors.