protologue

Web Search Tool

Also called web browsing, search grounding, grounding with search, browsing tool.

A web search tool lets a language model issue search queries, read the results, and ground its answer in current web content, usually returning citations to the pages it used.

Description

Search is the main remedy for a model's knowledge cutoff and for questions about prices, news, and other changing facts. Early work trained a model to browse with a text-based browser and cite its sources. Today providers offer search as a built-in tool. Search results are untrusted input, so they are a vector for indirect prompt injection.

Sources

  1. Nakano et al. (2021). WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback.
  2. Anthropic (2025). Web search tool.

Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Web Search Tool. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0137). https://protologue.com/t/web-search-tool/

BibTeX
@misc{protologue_web_search_tool,
  title = {Web Search Tool},
  author = {{Protologue}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.4.0},
  note = {Entry PTL-0137},
  url = {https://protologue.com/t/web-search-tool/}
}

Markdown JSON