Web Grounding

Web Grounding enables Amazon Nova to search the web for current information and provide responses with citations. This feature is useful for queries requiring up-to-date information beyond the model's training data.

How Web Grounding works

When Web Grounding is enabled for a prompt, the following steps are performed:

How to use Web Grounding

For full examples of code that utilizes Web Grounding, see the Code Samples section.

To include Web Grounding in your results, specify the following systemTool parameter in your toolConfig block:

import boto3
from botocore.config import Config

# Create the Bedrock Runtime client with extended timeout
bedrock = boto3.client(
    "bedrock-runtime",
    region_name="us-east-1",
    config=Config(read_timeout=3600)
)

# Define the tool configuration
tool_config = {
    "tools": [{
        "systemTool": {
            "name": "nova_grounding"
        }
    }]
}

# Send the request
response = bedrock.converse(
    modelId="us.amazon.nova-2-lite-v1:0",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [{"text": "What are the latest developments in quantum computing?"}]
    }],
    toolConfig=tool_config
)

# Extract text with interleaved citations
output_with_citations = ""
content_list = response["output"]["message"]["content"]
for content in content_list:
    if "text" in content:
        output_with_citations += content["text"]
    elif "citationsContent" in content:
        citations = content["citationsContent"]["citations"]
        for citation in citations:
            url = citation["location"]["web"]["url"]
            output_with_citations += f" [{url}]"

print(output_with_citations)

Regional availability

Web Grounding is currently only available in US regions and supported only by US CRIS profiles.

Response structure

The following is an example response. The response has been shortened for brevity:

{
  "output": {
    "message": {
      "content": [
        {
          "text": "Recent quantum computing developments include...",
          "citationsContent": [
            {
              "location": {
                "web": {
                  "url": "https://example.com/quantum-news",
                  "domain": "example.com"
                }
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Each citation includes:

Grounding safety

Your data never leaves AWS infrastructure. Model-generated queries stay within AWS services and are never sent to the broader internet. Our expansive internal web search index and knowledge graphs prioritize trustworthy and high-quality sources and filter malicious content on ingress. Finally, we protect your application against indirect prompt injection and misinformation with runtime filtering (note that this mitigation is limited for non-English languages).

Error handling

Do not include a toolSpec entry with the name nova_grounding. Including a tool with this name will result in an error.

The following is a list of potential errors that can occur when using Web Grounding:

Permissions required for built in tools

To ensure your role can access Web Grounding on Amazon Bedrock, you have two options:

{
    "Statement": [ 
        { 
            "Effect": "Allow", 
            "Action": ["bedrock:InvokeTool"], 
            "Resource": ["arn:aws:bedrock::{111122223333}:system-tool/amazon.nova_grounding"] 
        } 
    ] 
}

Web Grounding has the aws:requestedRegion condition key set to "unspecified". If your existing policies or Service Control Policies (SCPs) enforce this condition, you may encounter access issues. Updating the condition to allow an "unspecified" requestedRegion can resolve this problem.