GPT 4o Mini Search Preview combines GPT-4o mini's cost efficiency with built-in web search, grounding responses in real-time information from the web without requiring external search tool integration.
import { streamText } from 'ai'
const result = streamText({ model: 'openai/gpt-4o-mini-search-preview', prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'})GPT 4o Mini Search Preview was introduced on March 12, 2025 as part of OpenAI's expansion of the Responses API with new tools and features. It integrates web search directly into the model's inference pipeline, so the model can retrieve current information from the internet as part of generating a response.
This differs fundamentally from using a separate search API and feeding results into a model's context. With GPT 4o Mini Search Preview, the search happens within the model's reasoning flow, the model decides what to search for, evaluates the results, and synthesizes them into a coherent answer. This produces more naturally grounded responses and reduces the engineering overhead of building and maintaining a search-then-generate pipeline.
The model inherits GPT-4o mini's strengths: low cost per token, fast response times, vision support, and function calling. The addition of search makes it particularly valuable for applications where information freshness matters but the engineering investment of a full RAG system isn't justified.