Google’s URL Context Grounding: Another Nail in RAG’s Coffin?

Google's URL context grounding is a new tool for Gemini that programmatically reads, understands, and answers questions about content from web URLs, including PDFs. This feature bypasses the need for traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, as it does not require manual text extraction, chunking, or vectorization. The tool's capabilities are demonstrated through Python code examples, such as accurately extracting specific financial data from a complex PDF and performing a price comparison across multiple e-commerce sites. By grounding responses in specific web content, this functionality aims to improve factual accuracy, reduce hallucinations, and enable more sophisticated agentic workflows.