Turn on web search

Web search lets a Web Agent look things up on the web during a conversation. Turn it on when users ask about things outside your app and your documents, such as a competitor's public pricing or today's exchange rate.

Before you begin

Web search runs as a tool of Anthropic's API, so it depends on two settings.

• The workspace's model provider is Anthropic or Vercel AI Gateway. On Amazon Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry and LiteLLM the switch is disabled and the row says why. See Model providers.
• The agent's chat model is an Anthropic model. See Choose the chat model.

Turn on web search

To let the agent search:

1. In the portal, go to Web Agents and select your agent.
2. Select the Assistant tab, then Web search.
3. Turn on Web search.

The switch saves when you change it and applies to the next message. It does not need a publish.

How the agent searches

The model decides when to search. It can run up to 3 searches for one reply. The searches run on your model provider and are billed by it with the rest of the conversation.

With Vercel AI Gateway, replies that search are sent to the gateway's Anthropic upstream. If you brought your own Amazon Bedrock key to Vercel, those replies use Vercel's Anthropic credentials and are billed to your Vercel credits.

Troubleshooting

Next steps

• Add knowledge from files: answer from your own documents first.
• Choose the chat model: the model that decides when to search.
• Read the logs: see the searches the agent ran in a conversation.