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Search the web

Use the Search the web bulk tool to get up-to-date information sourced from recent web search data. The tool is built on the Perplexity API and allows you to:

  • Ask questions about companies, current events, facts, people, and more, and get fresh and accurate answers.
  • Search for information on specific web pages by providing their URLs.
note

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.

Prerequisites
  1. Click GPT for Excel Word in the Home tab. If you don't see it, go to Home > Add-ins > My add-ins > GPT for Excel Word.

  2. Click Search the web from the Bulk tools tab.



  3. Configure the Search the web tool to match the data in your sheet:
    1. Write a question.
    2. Select the column your question is About.
    3. Select the column to Put results in.
    4. (Optional) Toggle Show sources in column to display web search sources in a different column. This helps verify information sources.

      5. The image shows how to enter a prompt, select a relevant column for the prompt, and choose a column to put the results in

    4. Note: It is recommended to write your question in English, as this leads to better results. Learn more.

  4. Select if you want to run a specific number of rows or All rows. Then, click Run rows.

The answers to your question are generated in the selected column. If you enabled the Show sources in column option, the sources for each answer will be displayed in a separate column.

What's next

Check our best practices for searching the web.