GEMINI NEW April 7, 2026

Gemini 2.5 Pro: Google Search Grounding Free Up to 1,500 Queries/Day

WHAT CHANGED

Google has made grounding with Google Search free for up to 1,500 queries per day on Gemini 2.5 Pro via the Gemini API. Previously this was a paid add-on. Beyond 1,500 queries, standard grounding rates apply.

WHY IT MATTERS

Grounding means Gemini's responses are anchored to current web results — no hallucinated facts, no stale training data. For research tools, news aggregators, or any app where accuracy matters, 1,500 free grounded queries per day covers most indie hacker workloads completely.

HOW TO USE IT

Add the google_search tool to your request. The response includes grounding metadata with source URLs. For production apps with >1,500 queries/day, you'll hit standard pricing around $35/1M tokens.

GEMINI / PYTHON

import google.generativeai as genai
import os

genai.configure(api_key=os.environ["GEMINI_API_KEY"])

model = genai.GenerativeModel(
    model_name="gemini-2.5-pro",
    tools=[{"google_search": {}}],
)

response = model.generate_content(
    "What are the latest updates to Claude's API in 2026?",
    generation_config=genai.GenerationConfig(
        temperature=0.1,
    ),
)

# Print grounded response
print(response.text)

# Access grounding metadata (sources)
if response.candidates[0].grounding_metadata:
    for chunk in response.candidates[0].grounding_metadata.grounding_chunks:
        print(f"Source: {chunk.web.uri}")
        print(f"Title: {chunk.web.title}")

groundingsearchfree-tiergemini-2.5-proapi

ORIGINAL SOURCE

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding

VIEW ORIGINAL SOURCE →

Gemini 2.5 Pro grounding with Google Search is now free for your first 1,500 daily queries — real-time web knowledge at no cost for most projects.

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