Yes—Grok can search the internet in real time when its real-time search / web search capability is enabled in the product surface you’re using. The important nuance for developers is that this is typically implemented as a retrieval step, not as the base model “knowing the internet.” In other words, Grok can fetch or reference up-to-date sources, then use those retrieved snippets as context for the final response. That means answers can change over time as the retrieved sources change, and it also means you should treat “real-time” as “on-demand retrieval + summarization” rather than continuous live streaming. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
From an implementation standpoint, real-time search introduces tradeoffs you’ll feel immediately in production: latency, variance, and trust boundaries. A request that triggers live retrieval is usually slower than a purely model-only request. It also becomes harder to reproduce outputs in debugging because the set of retrieved pages can differ between runs. And you inherit security concerns like prompt injection from untrusted web content (for example, a page that includes “ignore prior instructions”). If you’re building a developer tool on top of Grok’s API, the safest pattern is to explicitly separate “retrieval” from “generation” in your architecture: log what was fetched, sanitize it, and then pass a bounded, curated context into the model.
In many apps, you’ll want a hybrid approach: use Grok’s real-time search for public context, but keep your internal ground truth under your control. For example, you might answer “What changed today?” from web results, but answer “What is our official policy?” from your own docs. That’s where a vector database such as Milvus or Zilliz Cloud fits naturally: you embed your documentation, retrieve the most relevant sections with permission checks, and provide that alongside any web-derived context. This reduces hallucinations and gives you an audit trail (retrieved doc IDs, chunk hashes, timestamps) that makes “real-time search” usable in a governed, developer-grade system.