Starting today (April 8, 2026), all requests to gemini-2.0-flash with google_search grounding return only triple backticks (```) instead of actual content.
Setup:
- Model: gemini-2.0-flash via v1beta endpoint
- Tool: {“google_search”: {}}
- SDK: @google/generative-ai 0.24.1
- Also reproduced via direct REST API (curl)
What happens:
- HTTP 200 (no error)
- finishReason: STOP (looks successful)
- webSearchQueries is populated — the search actually fires
- groundingChunks: — empty, no results come back
- Response text: just ``` followed by newline (4 characters)
What should happen:
- Full grounded response with search results and citations
- This worked correctly yesterday (April 8) and back for weeks
Reproduction (minimal curl):
curl “https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-2.0-flash:generateContent?key=YOUR_KEY”
-H “Content-Type: application/json”
-d ‘{“contents”:[{“parts”:[{“text”:“What is the latest news about Apple stock?”}]}],“tools”:[{“google_search”:{}}]}’
Confirmed NOT our code:
- Same model without google_search tool (pure mode) returns full responses
- Tested via both SDK and raw REST — same result
- No changes to our codebase between yesterday (working) and today (broken)
Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there a known outage with the Google Search grounding pipeline?
