OpenAI just expanded what its Responses API web search tool can return. Until now, web search in the Responses API only surfaced text results. With this update, it can also return image results, complete with source URLs, giving your app a way to pull in real-world visuals from the live web on demand.

What changed, exactly

Web search allows models to access up-to-date information from the internet and provide answers with sourced citations. The new addition extends that same pipeline to images. When a user query calls for visual content, the tool can now return image results alongside the usual text, and each result comes with a source link so you can display proper attribution.

The feature is part of the broader web_search tool in the Responses API. For new Responses API integrations, use { "type": "web_search" }. The earlier web_search_preview tool remains available for legacy integrations, but it does not support newer controls such as filters, external_web_access, and return_token_budget.

The problem it solves

Before this, if you wanted to surface images in an AI-powered app, you had two bad options: generate images from scratch using a model like GPT Image, or build a separate integration with a third-party image search API and stitch the results together manually. With Chat Completions API, this would require multiple steps, each requiring a round trip to the API: uploading an image and getting analysis, extracting info and calling an external web search as a manual step, then re-submitting tool results for summarization.