Your Decagon agent can now search the live web

Posted on August 28, 2026

Bihan Jiang
Director of Product

Article

An agent's knowledge base is only as current as the last time someone updated it. But customers ask about things that change by the hour: outages, pricing, shipping delays, news that just broke.

Without a way to check the live web, an agent either guesses or has to hand the conversation off, even when the answer is publicly available a search away. Today, every Decagon customer can turn on live web search in their agent settings using Perplexity's Search API.

Why customer-facing agents need current information

Your agent has always been grounded in a company's own knowledge. Help center content, CRM records, and internal documentation resolve the overwhelming majority of customer questions with high accuracy.

Some questions reach past that boundary. A traveler wants to know whether an entry requirement changed this week. A cardholder asks whether a payment network is having a known outage. These questions require time-sensitive answers, and until now they lived outside what an agent could reach.

Live web search extends that grounding from a company's own knowledge to the open web, with the same source attribution and accuracy standards enterprise teams expect.

What live web search unlocks

Once an agent can search the web mid-conversation, a whole category of questions stops being an escalation. Some examples:

• A policyholder asks whether their state has changed its minimum coverage requirement. The agent checks current regulatory sources and answers with a citation.
• A shopper references a product they saw mentioned in an article. The agent cross-references it against live web information and the current catalog.
• A customer reports trouble with a third-party carrier or payment provider. The agent checks for a known outage before troubleshooting further.
• A traveler asks whether weather or a local disruption will affect a scheduled booking. The agent checks live conditions and advises on options.

Every answer is grounded in a real-time search with cited sources.

Why we chose Perplexity’s Search API

We evaluated several options for live web grounding against four criteria.

• Answer quality. Relevant, source-linked results that hold up under scrutiny.
• Efficiency. Compact, high-signal responses that leave room for the agent to reason and hold conversation context.
• Latency and scale. Fast responses across millions of conversations a day.
• Enterprise readiness. Infrastructure already trusted for high-stakes use cases.

Perplexity's Search API led on all four. It provides access to the same index of hundreds of billions of web pages behind Perplexity's answer engine, with real-time indexing that processes tens of thousands of updates per second. New content becomes searchable almost immediately, so agents work from the latest information.

Get started

Live web search is available to all Decagon customers as a Tool Template. Customers can also reach out to their Decagon account manager to claim $1,000 in search credits, enough for 200,000 queries.

If you're interested in seeing how Decagon agents can ground conversations in live web data, book a demo.

Bihan Jiang
—
Director of Product

“With Decagon Voice, we’re able to combine high performance and seamless brand customization with cross-channel memory, ensuring every interaction is connected and true to Chime’s member-first values.”

Janelle Sallenave
Chief Operating Officer

Start improving your workflow with Decagon

With Decagon, CX teams don’t have to guess whether a change will improve CSAT or deflection. They can move quickly, measure what matters, and act on what works.