## [OpenAI web search vs. Parallel vs. Exa vs. Tavily: how to choose](https://parallel.ai/articles/openai-web-search-vs-parallel-vs-exa-vs-tavily-how-to-choose)

A weak search layer feeds your agent stale or irrelevant context, and no model or prompt change recovers that lost ground. You can swap in a stronger model, tune your prompts, or add reasoning loops, and none of it fixes a weak search layer. Feed stale, shallow, or irrelevant context into the model's window, and the model will produce confident wrong answers.