Web Search

Find real-time information from trusted internet sources.

Last updated: Feb 5, 2026


Overview

Web Search allows Harvey to reference real-time information from the internet — including current events, company websites, and newly published materials — to provide more accurate and up-to-date answers. This is especially useful when your work depends on recent legal developments, press releases, or regulatory updates that may not included in Harvey’s internal knowledge base.


Web Search is an optional feature, which Harvey admins must enable for use by their workspace users.

To enable Web Search:

  1. Go to Settings > Knowledge
  2. Toggle on Web Search for your workspace.

Once enabled, all users in a workspace can access Web Search.


Follow these steps to run a Web Search query:

  1. Click Files and sources to select Web Search as a knowledge source, or Harvey may recommend it underneath the prompt window.
    Select Web Search from the Knowledge Sources in Assistant.
  2. Input your query and specify if you want to restrict the web search to specific URLs.
    1. For example, the prompt “Find law review articles on privacy law on harvard.edu,” will ensure the response is constructed exclusively from information found on harvard.edu.
  3. Harvey reformulates your text into a secure search query and sends it our Web Search providers. From there, they return relevant results, which Harvey uses to produce a response, often including citations or summaries from the retrieved web pages.
    Example output when using web search.

Data Handling and Security

Data Flow

When users submit a Harvey query with Web Search enabled:

  • Harvey reviews the user’s request and creates a generalized keyword search query for secure transmission to the enabled Web Search provider. By design, keyword search queries shared with Web Search providers do not include customer documents stored in Vault, verbatim prompt text, or sensitive or identifying information such content could contain.
  • All data shared with Web Search providers is encrypted, processed temporarily, and deleted immediately after results are returned.
Image of data flow for web search

Web Search Providers

Harvey requires its Web Search providers to comply with strict contractual and technical safeguards:

  • No data storage, training, or human review: Neither Parallel nor You.com store, train on, or allow human access to Harvey customer data.
  • Temporary processing only: All Web Search queries are processed briefly and query content is deleted immediately after results are returned.
  • Secure environment: All processing occurs within our web processor's secure cloud infrastructures. To learn more about the security programs of Harvey’s web search providers, see here for Parallel and here for You.com.
  • U.S.-based data handling: Data is processed exclusively within the United States regardless of your workspace’s regional hosting choices.
  • End-to-end encryption (TLS 1.2+ in transit, AES-256+ at rest)

For additional details, see Harvey’s Service Terms and Trust Center.


FAQs

Data Processing & Privacy Controls

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