Use web search

Use this guide to enable web search in Atlas chat and ask questions that draw on information outside your project sources.

What this page covers

Turn web search on, understand returned sources and citations, and recover from missing or weak results.

When to use web search

Use web search when your question depends on information that is not in the sources already in your project:

• Current events or recent publications
• Context you have not imported yet
• Checking whether a claim appears in sources outside your project
• Gathering background before deciding what to add as a source

Use project-only chat when you need answers strictly from your imported material. Mixing both modes is useful when you are clear about which evidence should come from where.

Steps

1. Open chat in the project.
2. Enable web search in the chat input area.
3. Ask a question that requires current or outside information.
4. Review the answer and the cited web sources.
5. For any web result that should become permanent project evidence, add its URL as a website source.

Evaluate web results

Use web results to identify sources worth checking. Open the cited pages and judge their quality before relying on a claim. Prefer primary sources, official documentation, research papers, and reports over opinion or aggregator pages.

If a web page matters to the project, import it as a source so future chat answers can cite it as project evidence rather than an external link.

Correct the search scope