Turn Any LLM into a Web Search Model in OpenRouter
LLM models out of box does not have support for real time data.
However top AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic started providing web search as a tool using which you can get real time data.
Similar to that, if you’re using OpenRouter you can have such capability for any LLM model
How to do it?
Just suffix the model name with :online like openai/gpt-4o:online
That’s pretty much it.
This functionality is powered by Exa.ai and uses their auto mode (keyword search and embeddings-based web search).
Response
We’ll be getting response in OpenAI Chat Completion Message type schema
Something like
{
"message": {
"role": "assistant",
"content": "Here's the latest news I found: ...",
"annotations": [
{
"type": "url_citation",
"url_citation": {
"url": "https://www.example.com/web-search-result",
"title": "Title of the web search result",
"content": "Content of the web search result", // Added by OpenRouter if available
"start_index": 100, // The index of the first character of the URL citation in the message.
"end_index": 200 // The index of the last character of the URL citation in the message.
}
}
]
}
}
Pricing
This feature uses your OpenRouter credits and charges $4 per 1000 results in addition to LLM usage.
By default, max_results are set to 5 (max of $0.02 per request)
Configuration
You can customize the behaviour by passing in plugins when making LLM call.
{
"model": "openai/gpt-4o:online",
"plugins": [
{
"id": "web",
"max_results": 1, // Defaults to 5
"search_prompt": "Some relevant web results:" // See default below
}
]
}
Credits
Happy building apps!
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