Append :online to Any OpenRouter Model and It Just Googles

Append :online to any model name on OpenRouter and it pulls five sources from the web before responding.

Not five search results. Five actual fetched URLs, stuffed into context, handed to whatever model you were already calling.

anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet becomes anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet:online. meta-llama/llama-3.1-8b-instruct becomes meta-llama/llama-3.1-8b-instruct:online. Any model. The suffix doesn't care.

Four dollars per thousand URLs. Which means each web-augmented call costs you half a cent in retrieval fees on top of whatever the model costs — which is the kind of pricing that makes you realize you've been overthinking this whole RAG pipeline you've been planning.

There's something quietly absurd about this. The entire cottage industry of "how do I give my LLM access to the web" — the Tavily integrations, the SerpAPI keys, the browser-use agents, the Exa subscriptions — and OpenRouter's answer is a colon and a word. You didn't even need to change your client code. Just the model string.

Five sources isn't a lot. It's not agentic research, it's not deep search, it's not going to replace anything serious. But for "just answer my question with something that happened after your training cutoff" — which is most of what people actually want when they say they want web search — five sources is probably enough.

The part I keep thinking about is the "any model" part. Not "supported models." Any model. So now the question of "does this model have web access" has a uniform answer across the entire OpenRouter catalog, which is a genuinely useful property — you can stop tracking which providers have which capabilities and just append the suffix when you need it.

Half a cent per call to stop worrying about it seems like a reasonable trade.