Metadata_filter for file search stores in interactions API not working

Gemini API
, ,
1

The metadata filter for generateContent via the API seems to work but it doesn’t work on the interactions API. Is this a known issue? I know the syntax is different so will post two examples below but this is extremely frustrating - users are selecting knowledge sources and getting stonewalled by the API.

Example with generate content API which defo works:

{

    "contents": [

{

"role": "user",

"parts": [

{

"text": "User query"

}

]

}

],

"systemInstruction": {

"parts": [

{

"text": "insturction 1"

}

]

},

"tools": [

{

"fileSearch": {

"fileSearchStoreNames": [

"fileSearchStores/store_name"

],

"metadataFilter": "company=\"xxx\" AND (documentUrl=\"xxx\" OR documentUrl=\"xxxx\")"

}

}

]

}

Example with interactions API - filtering is 100% not working.

{

  "model": "gemini-3.1-pro-preview",

"input": "user query",

"tools": [

{

"type": "file_search",

"file_search_store_names": [

"fileSearchStores/store_name"

],

"metadata_filter": "company=\"xxx\" AND (documentUrl=\"xxx\" OR documentUrl=\"xxx\")"

}

],

"stream": false,

"store": true,

"system_instruction": "instruction."

}
2

Hi there thanks for sharing feedback. Can you share what you mean by “stonewalled by the API” or “100% not working”? Is it working sometimes? Also when it does works is it returning a 200 or the filtering isn’t functionally applied?

I was not able to reproduce this error and ran a simliar command over REST. The command below was able to give me a 200 response with filtering functioning

bash
curl -X POST "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/interactions" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "x-goog-api-key:MY_API_KEY" \
-d '{
   "model": "gemini-3.1-pro-preview",
   "input": "What is the company name in the document?",
   "tools": [
     {
       "type": "file_search",
       "file_search_store_names": ["fileSearchStores/MY_STORE"],
       "metadata_filter": "company=\"xxx\" AND (documenturl=\"xxx\" OR documentUrl=\"xxxx\")"
     }
   ]
}'
3

Update: I haven’t found the root cause, but it seems like the API only functionally fails when filtering for the key “documentUrl” in my tests. As a short term fix, could you try using different metadata key (e.g doc_url) and filter? Lmk if that works, it worked in my tests.

In the meantime, I’ll look into fixing this bug