Bringing Real‑Time Data to Swift Apps with OpenAI’s Web Search

Learn how to integrate OpenAI’s new Web Search feature into your Swift app to fetch live data, manage context size, and deliver up‑to‑the‑minute results.

Large language models (LLMs) are incredibly powerful, but they all share one fundamental limitation: their knowledge is frozen at a training cutoff date of often more than a year ago, so they can’t discuss today’s headlines or live stock quotes, for example. That isn’t a problem when you just want a haiku or a piece of creative writing, but it does become a deal‑breaker if your app needs real‑time data—like current market prices, breaking news, or movie showtimes.

This is where the web search tool comes into play - a way for the LLM to query the web and incorporate those real-time results into its output. Google’s models have included grounding with Google search for a few months now—an eternity in AI years—but OpenAI has only just added the same capability. Here’s how you can incorporate the Web Search tool in your AI-powered Swift app in two ways: