Google's Gemini capability that fetches and reads the content of a specific supplied URL, enabling document grounding.
The URL Context tool is Google's capability that lets Gemini fetch and read the content of a specific web address you supply. Internally it works like a browse function: given one or more URLs, it visits each page, extracts the main text and title, and hands that back to the model to answer from.
This was a genuinely new step for Google, whose models were previously limited to the search-grounding tool alone. It enables document grounding — answering from a page you point at rather than from an open web search — and combines with Gemini's search tool so the model can both find and deeply read pages.
A practical note we flagged at launch: the Gemini app and API URL grounding can read live pages, but AI Mode did not. For SEOs it reinforces that clean, extractable main content matters whenever a model reads your page directly.
