Grounding with Google Search

Using Grounding with Google Search, you can improve the accuracy and recency of responses from the model. Starting with Gemini 2.0, Google Search is available as a tool. This means that the model can decide when to use Google Search. The following example shows how to configure Search as a tool.

Learn how to install or update the Google Gen AI SDK for Python.
For more information, see the Gen AI SDK for Python API reference documentation or the python-genai GitHub repository.
Set environment variables to use the Gen AI SDK with Vertex AI:

# Replace the `GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT` and `GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION` values
# with appropriate values for your project.
export GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT=GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT
export GOOGLE_CLOUD_LOCATION=us-central1
export GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=True

from google import genai
from google.genai.types import (
    GenerateContentConfig,
    GoogleSearch,
    HttpOptions,
    Tool,
)

client = genai.Client(http_options=HttpOptions(api_version="v1"))

response = client.models.generate_content(
    model="gemini-2.0-flash-001",
    contents="When is the next total solar eclipse in the United States?",
    config=GenerateContentConfig(
        tools=[
            # Use Google Search Tool
            Tool(google_search=GoogleSearch())
        ],
    ),
)

print(response.text)
# Example response:
# 'The next total solar eclipse in the United States will occur on ...'

The Search-as-a-tool functionality also enables multi-turn searches and multi-tool queries (for example, combining Grounding with Google Search and code execution).

Search as a tool enables complex prompts and workflows that require planning, reasoning, and thinking:

  • Grounding to enhance factuality and recency and provide more accurate answers
  • Retrieving artifacts from the web to do further analysis on
  • Finding relevant images, videos, or other media to assist in multimodal reasoning or generation tasks
  • Coding, technical troubleshooting, and other specialized tasks
  • Finding region-specific information or assisting in translating content accurately
  • Finding relevant websites for further browsing

What's next