Google Grounding API
GoogleGrounding with Google Search is Google's managed capability for grounding Gemini model responses in real-time Google Search results, offered on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI). A companion option, Grounding with Agent Search, grounds responses in an organization's own website data or documents instead. The capability is tightly integrated with the Gemini models and is the platform's search-augmented generation path.
Openness
1 high confidence- license
- proprietary(GCP-managed API)
- source
- closed
- managed
- Vertex-AI/Gemini-Agent-Platform
Grounding with Google Search is offered only as a managed Google Cloud feature for Gemini models, and the documentation describes nothing to download, license or self-host. It depends on Google's own search index, which is not available outside the service.
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/grounding/overview recorded 2026-09-28
The grounding overview documents a managed Google Cloud capability ("Connect your model to world knowledge and a wide possible range of topics using results from Google's search engine."), and the page's only license text covers the documentation itself ("code samples are licensed under the" Apache 2.0 License). Searched the body for self-host, download and open source: none, so nothing that runs the grounding service is offered for download or under a license.
Adoption
5 medium confidenceGrounding with Google Search is the default way a Gemini call reaches the live web, available across the Gemini app, AI Studio and Vertex AI -- the same broad-surface reasoning applied to Gemini's own reach. Google publishes no call-volume figure for it, so the reading reflects the platforms it reaches rather than a count of grounded requests.
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/grounding/overview recorded 2026-09-17
The vendor's own documentation for the tool, establishing that it is a first-party feature of the platform surface the record names as the countable surface and that no usage figure is published for it.
Capability
5 medium confidenceGrounding with Google Search returns the model's composed answer along with grounding metadata that attributes it to the sources retrieved, rather than a result list for the caller to read. That puts it level with Azure's Grounding with Bing Search, the same shape from the other hyperscaler.
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/grounding/overview recorded 2026-09-17
Vertex AI grounding overview: grounding connects a Gemini model to live Google Search, and the response carries grounding metadata attributing the model's answer to the retrieved sources.
Verified 2026-09-17