OpenClaw web search

OpenClaw’s web search is a tool the agent calls with a query and gets normalized results back from whichever provider you configured, cached by query for fifteen minutes. Beside it sit two siblings: web fetch, which retrieves one URL and always runs locally, and x search, which searches posts on X through xAI. None of the three is a browser. Here is how the tool is configured, the provider list with the key-free ones marked, the difference from the browser tool, and the caveat that applies to every one of them.

web_search is a lightweight HTTP tool, not browser automation.

Configuring it

Pick a provider, then run the configure command for the web section, which stores the provider and any credential; for API-backed providers, setting the provider’s environment variable is enough to skip that step. You can also configure it by talking to OpenClaw, in setup or in the Control UI’s settings chat, where keys are masked in the browser and the terminal chat hands off to a masked wizard.

The providers

• Key-free: DuckDuckGo, through an unofficial HTML integration; Parallel Search in its free tier, an opt-in Search MCP with dense excerpts; SearXNG, self-hosted, aggregating several engines; and Ollama web search from a signed-in local host.
• Structured results with a key: Brave, with country, language and time filters and an LLM-context mode; Exa, neural and keyword with content extraction; Firecrawl; Perplexity; Tavily; MiniMax; Parallel’s paid tier.
• Synthesized answers with citations: Gemini through Google Search grounding, Grok through xAI web grounding, Kimi through Moonshot, and Codex hosted search through a Codex account.
• The docs say Brave has a free tier and that Grok is the provider through which web search routes on xAI Responses; x search always uses xAI.

What it is not

• Not a browser: for JavaScript-heavy sites and logins the docs send you to the browser tool.
• Not a fetcher: for one known URL, web fetch is the tool, and it runs locally.
• Not safe by default against what it reads: search results are untrusted text, and the prompt-injection guidance applies to everything the agent pulls in.

The OpenClaw browser tool is the isolated browser the docs point to for the first case, and OpenClaw and prompt injection is the reading for the third.

Which one to pick

The docs do not rank them. A reasonable reading of the table: key-free DuckDuckGo or Parallel to start, Brave when you want filters and a free tier, a synthesized provider when the model you already pay for has grounding, and SearXNG when nothing may leave your network. Provider choice for search is separate from provider choice for the model; OpenClaw models and providers covers the latter.

On Diali

On Diali, web search works from the first message with a free built-in provider, and a key of your own switches the assistant to that provider for good, which also turns the fallback off. Hosted OpenClaw on Diali is the assistant.

• Fifteen providers, four of them key-free.
• Search, fetch and browser are three tools, not one.
• Whatever it reads is untrusted text.