Grounding Is Not Solved: DIY vs Gateway vs Native Search

Grounding used to mean wiring up a search API, a scraper, and a lot of glue. Now there's a middle tier — gateways like OpenRouter and Vercel that bolt search onto any model — plus models that search on their own. This episode walks through all three routes: the five moving parts of DIY, how gateway routing actually decides which engine to use, and what native grounding really costs once token weight and hidden dials enter the picture. Along the way: per-search versus per-prompt billing, encrypted result blocks you have to pass back, domain-filter limits that range from zero to a hundred, and a worked thousand-question cost comparison with prices as published this week.

Episode 6146 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6146 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/338183)