Web Search
Lets your agents look things up on the live web — and cite where the answer came from.
Most integrations connect Claude to your data: your store, your analytics, your inbox. Web Search connects it to everything else. Turn it on and an agent can go read the actual page — a competitor's pricing, a supplier's spec sheet, this morning's coverage of your category — instead of relying on what it happens to remember.
What it does
Web Search finds pages by meaning, not by keyword matching. An agent can ask for "a technical breakdown of espresso boiler types written by a specialty retailer" and get pages that are actually about that, rather than pages that happen to contain those words.
Each result comes back with its title, URL, publication date, and an extract of the page text. Because every result carries a real source link, an agent using Web Search can show you where a claim came from — which is the whole point. If a search finds nothing, the agent should tell you it found nothing, not fill the gap from memory.
Typical uses:
- Checking what a competitor is currently saying or charging
- Finding current documentation for a tool you're integrating with
- Pulling recent news or coverage in your category
- Verifying a specific claim against a real source before it goes in a report
Setting it up
There's nothing to connect and no API key to paste. Web Search is provisioned at the platform level, so an admin just enables it for your organization and grants it to the groups that should have it — the same way as any other integration.
As with every integration, an agent can only use Web Search if one of its groups has been granted access. If an agent tells you it can't search the web, that's almost always a missing group grant rather than a broken connection.
Limits worth knowing
Web Search runs on shared capacity, so On Belay applies a few limits to every request automatically:
- Up to 10 results per search. Ask for a hundred and you'll get ten.
- Up to 3,000 characters of text per page, and 1,000 characters per highlight. Enough to judge and quote a page, not enough to swallow it whole.
- Standard search depth. Requests for deeper, slower, more expensive search modes are quietly reduced to the standard one.
These aren't errors — the search still runs and still returns results. You just won't get more by asking for more.
The practical implication for anyone writing agent instructions: several narrow searches beat one enormous one. That's true for cost, and it's also true for quality, because a meaning-based search does better with a specific question than a broad one.
Web Search is read-only. It can look things up; it cannot post, publish, or change anything anywhere.
Privacy
Search queries your agents run are sent to the search provider to fulfill the request. Don't put customer records, credentials, or other confidential data into a search query — the same rule that applies to any external lookup. Every search is recorded in your organization's audit log, so you can see what was searched and when.