Deep Research agent: annotations array not provided

Gemini API
,
1

The structure of the response from the ‘deep-research-pro-preview-12-2025’ agent usually looks like this:

status
outputs
	outputs[0]
		text
		annotations
			annotations[0]
				url https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/...
				start_index
				end_index
			annotations[1]
			...
		type

Today I got:

outputs
	outputs[0]
		text
		type

The same prompt for 15 days and the first weird response. It’s the same general task, but the date of the Google grounding is wrong (it used the date 15 May 2024 instead of today). As the annotations are not included, I would guess that it didn’t perform a Google search and is just hallucinating. It took 45 minutes to respond.

Request ID: v1_ChduYURCYWFmcEdLek********************FEQmFhZnBHS3pNbnNFUDFfckktUTg

2

Hi

Are you still experiencing the issue when you update the date to be current ? or was this a one-off issue where the input date was incorrect ?

3

No, it only happened once. But I received an “in_progress” status periodically. In my case, if the research takes more than 50 minutes, I create a new one.