Grounding with Google Search is not working

Google AI Studio
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I’m using Google AI studio with Gemini 2.5 Pro. As a response to my prompt, it says it did a search for “site:substack.com bangalore startup” (without quotes) and the search returned no results from the Substack domain.

However, when I type the same search query into Google, I get 2,890 results. The pages I randomly checked have a ton of Substack-domain results.

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Gemini 2.5 Pro’s grounded responses don’t perform real-time Google Search. Instead, they use internal retrieval systems, which may not support advanced operators like site: or return full web parity.

If real-time search fidelity is essential, consider using Google Programmable Search Engine and pass the retrieved content to the model via prompt input:

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