Web Search

Model-agnostic grounding

You can incorporate relevant web search results for any model on OpenRouter by activating and customizing the web plugin, or by appending :online to the model slug:

1{
2  "model": "openai/gpt-4o:online"
3}

This is a shortcut for using the web plugin, and is exactly equivalent to:

1{
2  "model": "openrouter/auto",
3  "plugins": [{ "id": "web" }]
4}

The web search plugin is powered by Exa and uses their “auto” method (a combination of keyword search and embeddings-based web search) to find the most relevant results and augment/ground your prompt.

Parsing web search results

Web search results for all models (including native-only models like Perplexity and OpenAI Online) are available in the API and standardized by OpenRouterto follow the same annotation schema in the OpenAI Chat Completion Message type:

1{
2  "message": {
3    "role": "assistant",
4    "content": "Here's the latest news I found: ...",
5    "annotations": [
6      {
7        "type": "url_citation",
8        "url_citation": {
9          "url": "https://www.example.com/web-search-result",
10          "title": "Title of the web search result",
11          "content": "Content of the web search result", // Added by OpenRouter if available
12          "start_index": 100, // The index of the first character of the URL citation in the message.
13          "end_index": 200 // The index of the last character of the URL citation in the message.
14        }
15      }
16    ]
17  }
18}

Customizing the Web Plugin

The maximum results allowed by the web plugin and the prompt used to attach them to your message stream can be customized:

1{
2  "model": "openai/gpt-4o:online",
3  "plugins": [
4    {
5      "id": "web",
6      "max_results": 1, // Defaults to 5
7      "search_prompt": "Some relevant web results:" // See default below
8    }
9  ]
10}

By default, the web plugin uses the following search prompt, using the current date:

A web search was conducted on `date`. Incorporate the following web search results into your response.
IMPORTANT: Cite them using markdown links named using the domain of the source.
Example: [nytimes.com](https://nytimes.com/some-page).

Pricing

The web plugin uses your OpenRouter credits and charges $4 per 1000 results. By default, max_results set to 5, this comes out to a maximum of $0.02 per request, in addition to the LLM usage for the search result prompt tokens.

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