What is a web search tool in an AI model?
Published . Updated .
Web search tool: A tool a language model can call to run web searches during an answer, choosing its own queries and citing the pages it uses.
Claude's and OpenAI's documentation both describe the model deciding whether to search, running one or more queries and returning citations with the answer. xAI documents the same for Grok, alongside a separate X search. Each search is a tool call.
The queries the model chooses are its fan-out. How AI assistants search compares the three.
Read next
Sources
- Web search tool, Claude documentation
- Web search, OpenAI API documentation
- Web search, xAI documentation
See the fan-out for your own prompts
Only Fan Out is a free Chrome side panel that lists the queries, fetched pages and cited pages behind each ChatGPT, Claude or Grok answer. Nothing leaves your browser.
Add to Chrome, it's free