Academy
3. Choosing and Combining Source Providers
Select the right mix of web, academic, news, and specialized providers to balance coverage, speed, and cost.
Deep Research queries multiple source providers in parallel — web, academic, news, and specialized — then cross-checks findings into a single sourced report. The key decision before every launch is which providers to activate. Each category serves a different purpose: academic providers excel at peer-reviewed science and technical literature, news providers surface current events and recent developments, web providers cover general topics broadly, and specialized providers target niche databases. Selecting all of them maximizes coverage but increases processing time and cost. Selecting only the most relevant ones produces a tighter, faster, and cheaper report. Your goal is to match the nature of your question to the strengths of each provider category.
Think of source selection as a spectrum between precision and breadth.
• Narrow selection (1–2 provider types): Best when you know exactly where the answer lives. Example: a question about a recent clinical trial → academic only. A question about yesterday's policy announcement → news only. Faster, cheaper, and the report stays focused.
• Broad selection (3+ or Select All): Best for exploratory questions where you need multiple angles — e.g., 'What is the current state of carbon capture?' benefits from academic papers, recent news, and specialized industry sources. Coverage is maximized, but the session takes longer and costs more.
Use the Select All / Clear shortcuts to toggle quickly between these strategies.
Start narrow, then widen. Launch with the one or two provider types most likely to answer your question. If the report comes back thin, use Try Again with additional sources enabled. This iterative approach saves cost and helps you learn which providers deliver the best results for your domain.
Some providers may not be included in your current plan. In Settings, you can add your own API keys for individual providers. This does two things: it unlocks providers your plan doesn't cover, and it shifts the query cost for those providers to your own account. This is especially useful if you already pay for a specialized database or academic index — you can plug that key in and Deep Research will include it in its parallel queries, giving you richer reports without duplicating subscriptions.
Adding your own API key for a provider you use heavily can be more cost-effective than relying on platform quotas, especially for high-volume research. Check Settings to see which providers accept external keys and connect the ones relevant to your work.
Go to Deep Research and type a question you're currently working on. First, select only the single most relevant provider category and launch. Once the report arrives, open it and note the coverage. Then use Try Again with two or three additional provider types enabled. Compare both reports: notice how adding sources changes depth, breadth, and the types of citations returned.
Match providers to your question: academic for science, news for current events, web for general topics, specialized for niche domains. Start narrow for speed and cost efficiency; widen with Select All when you need exploratory breadth. If a report is thin, relaunch with different or additional sources via Try Again. Use your own API keys in Settings to unlock extra providers and control costs. The right source mix is the single biggest lever for report quality.