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Web search (beta)

Augment assistant answers with real-time results from the internet when your documentation does not fully cover a question.

warning

Enabling web search means your assistant can return answers your team did not write, review, or approve. Responses may be inaccurate, outdated, or inconsistent with your product's terminology and tone, and you have limited control over which sources are used.

How it works​

When web search is enabled, the assistant first looks for an answer in your documentation. If the documentation is not enough, it searches the web and combines both sources in the response.

A web search is triggered when the assistant decides it needs outside information. Running the web search adds five interactions to the question's base usage, even if it returns no usable content. An Auto or Instant question with web search therefore uses six interactions. Think mode can use more.

Web-search interactions count toward your team's included allowance. With extra usage enabled, interactions beyond that allowance cost $0.05 each.

Web search is a fallback, not a substitute for good documentation. Before turning it on, consider whether the gap is better closed by improving your docs:

  • Accuracy: Web sources may contradict your documentation, reference outdated versions of your product, or surface answers from competitors and unofficial forums.
  • Brand voice: Answers pulled from the web will not match your product's terminology, tone, or style.
  • Support burden: Incorrect answers sourced from the web can generate support tickets that are harder to trace, since the source is not under your control.

In most cases, expanding your documentation is the safer long-term choice. Web search is most appropriate for narrow, well-defined gaps such as third-party integrations or ecosystem topics that are not worth maintaining in your own docs.

You can constrain web search behavior by extending your project's prompt, for example by restricting which topics the assistant should answer from the web, instructing it to prefer official sources, or requiring it to flag when an answer comes from outside your documentation. See Custom prompt for details.

important

Only Administrator or Maintainer roles can manage projects. See Manage roles.

  1. In the Biel.ai dashboard, select your project.

  2. Click Settings.

  3. Open Assistant in the left sidebar and, under AI model and instructions, check Enable web search.

    Enable web search in the AI model and instructions section

  4. Click Save on the AI model and instructions card.