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docs.near.aicloud › guides › web search

NEAR AI Cloud: Web Search

Updated 02-11-2026

Give models access to live web results through Chat Completions

NEAR AI Cloud provides a built-in server-side web search tool for Chat Completions. The model decides when to search, the platform executes the search, and the results are fed back to the model without tool-handling code on your side.

Web search is billed per request as a platform service in addition to model tokens. Current pricing is available from the public /v1/services endpoint.

[!WARNING]

The stateless Responses API does not execute built-in web_search or web_context_search tools. Use Chat Completions as shown below, or expose search as a custom function and execute it in your application.

Chat Completions API

web_context_search is also available on /v1/chat/completions. It requires stream: true:

curl https://cloud-api.near.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "model": "z-ai/glm-5.2",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is the current population of Tokyo? One short sentence."}],
    "tools": [{"type": "web_context_search"}],
    "stream": true
  }'

The stream interleaves the search activity with the answer:

  1. delta.tool_calls chunks show the model composing its search query (function name web_context_search)
  2. a delta.nearai_tool_result chunk carries the search results that were injected back into the model's context
  3. regular delta.content (and delta.reasoning_content) chunks stream the final answer

This makes it easy to display "searching the web…" states and surface sources in your UI.

[!NOTE]

Unlike client-side function calling, you never receive a finish_reason: "tool_calls" response that you have to answer — the search loop runs entirely server-side, on infrastructure operated by NEAR AI.

See Also