The more context and details you add, the better your response because the model understands precisely what you expect. Do not miss our Prompt Engineering Guide to learn how to write great prompts.

Web search solves a core technical limitation of AI models. Large language models go through two phases: training (when they’re “built”) and then deployment (when you use them). Once training is complete, the model’s knowledge is frozen at that cutoff date and can’t be updated. This means even the newest models become outdated the moment they’re released.

The web search tool bridges this gap in two steps:

  1. Search: A query is generated and searches the internet for relevant results
  2. Context: Those results get sent to the AI along with your prompt to generate an informed answer

Perfect for:

  • Gathering current information on any topic
  • Getting real-time data and recent developments
  • Searching specific websites (just include the URL in your prompt)

Want to understand more about how AI training works? Check out our guide about how AI works.

To use Web search, open a new chat and select a model that supports web search. You’ll see web search availability indicated by the icon in the model selector if the web search icon is greyed out, that model doesn’t support web search.

When using models that support web search, activate it by clicking the web search button in the input bar at the bottom of your screen. You can also use keyboard shortcuts: ⌥+W (macOS) or Alt+W (Windows).

Once you activate web search, the button will highlight to confirm it’s active, and you can begin searching the internet or accessing websites using web search.

Web search automatically triggers when the AI detects that your prompt requires information beyond its training cutoff date.

Your then prompt gets reformatted into an optimized search query, then our search model finds relevant results across the web. Once the search is complete, the model analyzes findings from multiple websites and synthesizes them into a comprehensive answer for you.

The whole process happens seamlessly in the background, so you get current information without any extra steps on your end.

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Inspecting sources

When you want to see what websites the AI used to write the response, click on Searched for “your search query” to view the complete list of websites that were analyzed.

On this view, you can see the citations and search results from your web search.

When you hover over a citation, it highlights exactly which paragraph quoted that specific website. Below the main response, you’ll find all the other search results that were analyzed during the search but didn’t make it into the final answer.

This gives you full transparency into both what sources were used and what additional information was considered but not included.