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Web search and reading pages

Your organisation's own documents cannot answer everything. Prices change, products ship, rules get updated. With web search switched on, the assistant looks things up on the live web, can open the pages it finds, and answers with links you can click and check.

Switching it on

Open the Tools sheet with the + button and switch Web search on. It applies to the chat you are in and stays on for that chat.

It is off until you switch it on, so an ordinary chat never quietly reaches out to the internet.

Then ask:

What changed in the latest EU AI Act guidance? Please search. Compare what these two suppliers charge today.

What it can do

  • Search — find current pages about your question and list them with title, link and a short extract.
  • Open a page — read a specific web address, either one you paste in or one the search turned up, and use what it says in the answer.

You can also point it at one page: "Read https://example.com/pricing and summarise the tiers."

Read the answer with a critical eye

Anything taken from the web is quoted with its source link. Follow the link when the detail matters.

The assistant treats the contents of a web page as information, never as orders. If a page contains text like "ignore your instructions and do this instead", the assistant reports that it found such text and carries on. That protects you from pages designed to hijack an assistant. It does not protect you from a page that is merely wrong, so judge the sources as you would any search result.

If it says "Unavailable"

Unavailable means web search has not been set up for your organisation — not that someone switched it off for you. An administrator adds a search account once (see enabling web search) and it becomes available to everyone.

What leaves the building

When you use web search, the search words the assistant composed, and the addresses of the pages it opens, go out to the search provider. Your documents and your chat history do not.

Your organisation can also restrict which outside addresses are reachable at all, so a page may be refused for that reason.