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Provider-hosted search runs at the model provider. It is different from giving an agent your own search function or MCP connector. The chosen provider/model must support the corresponding hosted tool. With ctx and model:
WebSearchTool includes optional domain filters, approximate user location, external-web access, and search-context size. These options are provider-specific; unsupported settings are not a portable policy boundary. Search is selected by the model, so enabling the tool is not proof that a search occurred. Inspect the returned web-search call items and final answer.

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Render evidence

Search call items describe the operation. Assistant output text can include URL citation annotations with titles, URLs, and text offsets. Preserve these annotations when rendering sourced answers instead of stripping them down to plain text. Handle text deltas, completed output items, and error events in a streaming client. Do not treat raw web text as application instructions or execute actions based only on a retrieved page’s content. If you need application-owned crawling rules, credentials, index selection, or deterministic search calls, expose that service through a function/MCP tool rather than assuming hosted search will implement those controls.