Overview of Vertex AI Search

Build secure, Google-quality enterprise-grade generative AI applications for search and recommendations. Vertex AI Search lets developers, even those with limited machine learning skills, to tap into the power of Google's foundation models and search and recommendation expertise.

Try it!

Try this working demo of Vertex AI Search, indexed on this documentation site. It retrieves search results and provides AI-generated answers based on the results. You can search with keywords or natural language queries.

To get an AI-generated answer, ask a complete question likeWhat is Vertex AI Search? orWhat are the features of custom search?

Key capabilities and configurations

Vertex AI Search offers the following key capabilities and configurations:

  • Search

    Out-of-the-box natural language understanding and semantic search.

  • Recommendations

    ML-based content and metadata understanding so that your users quickly find content that is similar to the content that they're looking for.

  • Generative AI

    Generative AI-powered answers and summarization with conversational search.

  • Console or API

    Use the AI Application page in Google Cloud console or the Discovery Engine API to set up a search widget for your users.

  • Widget

    Integrate the search into your website using the widget.

  • Self-learning models

    Get self-learning ranking models and advanced analytics. This requires user events that based on user's clickstream.

  • Optimization for media

    Create recommendation and search apps optimized for media content.

  • Natural language querying of healthcare data

    Search FHIR resources without prior knowledge of any query language.

  • Context-aware healthcare searches

    Find search results with semantic relevance that a structured FHIR search might miss.

Get started

Vertex AI Search offers the search and recommendations in the following business areas:

Custom search

Made for vertical-agnostic use cases, use custom search to search within your public websites or to search within data stores containing your proprietary data.

Media search

Designed for media content such as movies, videos, and music, you can use media search to help your audience efficiently find the media content that they want to view or listen to.

Healthcare search

A specialized search for healthcare records in FHIR data stores, allowing you to query both clinical data and referenced unstructured files like images and PDFs.

Custom recommendations (Preview)

Powered by the user events that you gather, use custom recommendations to deliver the best results for your users.

Media recommendations

Receive tailored recommendations for media content such as videos, news, and music, helping audiences discover personalized content with results customized by optimization objectives.

Product name terminology

Vertex AI Search is a child product ofAI Applications. Because this documentation set only discussesVertex AI Search. The name AI Applications is used on the Google Cloud Console UI and in the documentation to discuss the UI page.

Behind the scenes, Vertex AI Search uses theDiscovery Engine API. When you run curl commands or programmatically use the API, you see references to thediscoveryengine.googleapis.com endpoint. The Gemini Enterprise product also uses the Discovery Engine API.

Product rebrand: This product has been renamed since its introduction. Some of the former names includeAI Applications,Agent Builder,Vertex AI Search and Conversation, Enterprise Search, andGenerative AI App Builder. Regardless of the rebrand, the product's functionalities, such as search, recommendations, generative AI answers, and browse, remain true to the Google quality.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under theCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under theApache 2.0 License. For details, see theGoogle Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2026-01-27 UTC.