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OpenAI Web Search

closed / Overall score: 5.0(leading)

Built-in tool in the OpenAI Responses API that lets a model search the live web during a call and return an answer with inline citations to the pages it used.

A tool inside an API rather than a standalone search endpoint, billed per tool call. The documented URL moved: platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search now redirects to developers.openai.com.

Openness

1 high confidence

1.0

license: Proprietary(API-only)
source: closed(no index or serving code published
managed: cloud SaaS with API keys, billed per tool call alongside model tokens

Closed: a hosted tool inside a hosted API. Nothing of the retrieval path is published.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search recorded 2026-09-16
The web search tool guide in the OpenAI API documentation: a built-in tool of the Responses API, enabled per request and billed with the call. No self-hosting, no source, no separate search endpoint.

Adoption

5 medium confidence

5.0

OpenAI Web Search is a built-in tool of the Responses API, OpenAI's main developer surface, enabled per request and the default way a call on that surface reaches the live web. No usage count is published for the tool, and this record reads only that surface, not ChatGPT, which is a separate product.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search recorded 2026-09-16
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 confidence

5.0

OpenAI Web Search returns the model's composed answer with citations to the sources it retrieved, rather than a list of results for the caller to read, the same shape as Azure's Grounding with Bing Search. That puts the two tools level with each other.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search recorded 2026-09-16
The web search tool guide: the tool searches the web during a model call and the response carries citations to the pages used.

Verified 2026-09-16