Search the web

Access fresh web search data and retrieve up-to-date information about companies, current events, facts, people, and more, in bulk directly in Microsoft Excel. For example, you can search for the specifications of a product to include in your catalog.

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• Search the web is the only bulk tool that generates responses based on recent web search data.
• It is built on the Perplexity API and uses Perplexity Sonar model, regardless of the model you select in the model switcher. For more information, see Supported models.

Run the bulk tool

Prerequisites

• You have installed GPT for Excel.
• You have opened a workbook containing text for your web search in a column.

1. Click GPT for Excel Word in the Home tab.

   
   
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   You can also go to Home > Add-ins > My add-ins > GPT for Excel Word.

2. In the sidebar, select Bulk tools, and click Search the web.

   

3. Set up your bulk tool run.

   

   	Field	Description	Example
   	Column name row (optional)	If your column names aren't in the first row, select the number of the row that contains the column names. The bulk tool will run on the rows below this one.	2
   	Write a question	Describe the task you want the AI to perform based on the target text. For example, ask a question about the text or request content based on the text. The AI generates the response based on fresh web search data.	List 3 unique selling propositions on this company website. Just generate the 3 USPs in a short list, don't elaborate.
   	About each cell in column	Select the column that contains the text to search the web for.	A: Company
   	Put results in column	Select the column to put the results in. Cells in this column won't be overwritten with the results if they contain text.	B: Unique Selling Propositions
   	Show sources (optional)	Select to show the sources of the information. The sources will be written in the column to the right of the results column. Cells in this column won't be overwritten with the sources if they contain text.	Show sources in column C

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   The setup for the bulk tool run is stored in the History and can be reused for other runs.

   

4. Run the Search the web bulk tool starting from the first empty cell in the results column:

   1. Select a specific number of rows to run or select All rows.
   2. Click Run rows.
   
   

You have set up and run the Search the web bulk tool. If needed, try improving the results.

Improve results

Show sources

Enable the Show sources option to write the sources of the information in the column to the right of the results column. This helps you understand where the information comes from and assess its reliability.

If you provide a URL in the question or in the input column About each cell in column, this option also helps you check if the URL you provided is actually used to generate the response.

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Searching a specific page only works if:

• Perplexity's web crawler has already independently indexed the content of the page. The crawler does not index new pages on demand based on URLs you provide. In addition, the crawler respects robots.txt directives and does not index disallowed content.
• The URL points directly to the page without any redirects. To check if a URL results in redirects, use the Redirect Checker.

If a specific URL does not produce valid results, use a different source of information.

Refine your question

Edit your question to:

• Provide more context. For example, add the following to your question to remove ambiguity:

  The company is a clothing retailer.
• Specify what to do when the answer cannot be found. For example, add the following to your question to avoid irrelevant information to be returned:

  If the answer cannot be found, return "N/A".

Break down complex tasks

The Perplexity model is not ideal for precise rendering tasks. For such cases, start by searching the web to gather relevant information using the Web search bulk tool. Then process the results with a model like gpt-4o-mini, which works well for tasks such as classification, extraction, or generating yes/no responses. For example, you can use the Web search bulk tool to retrieve a company's description from their website and then apply the Classify / Categorize bulk tool to determine its industry.

What's next

Try another bulk tool.