urlContext gemini api tool does not seem to work via API but gemini.google.com does it fine

Gemini API
1

Hey, I’m trying to get the gemini api to fetch a url which is a pinggy link (it’s like ngrok) that goes to a local server i have that just returns a hello world html page - this is just to test urlContext capabilities. When I try the query in gemini.google.com it works perfectly fine, i see the fetch happen on my server, and the it outputs the html it got back. But locally I don’t even see the request come in to my server - this is the API request I am making:

{
  model: 'models/gemini-3-pro-preview',
  contents: [
    {
      role: 'user',
      parts: [
        {
          text: 'Get this url pls https://rzgfgwnpjl.a.pinggy.link/op/get/APP01 - it is tunnel so you can access it. Summarize its content for me.'
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  config: {
    maxOutputTokens: 54000,
    stopSequences: undefined,
    abortSignal: AbortSignal { aborted: false },
    temperature: 0.7,
    thinkingConfig: { includeThoughts: true, thinkingLevel: 'HIGH' },
    systemInstruction: 'You are a helpful assistant',
    tools: [ { googleSearch: {} }, { urlContext: {} } ]
  }
}

I have tried asking gemini further messages for that it tried and what it saw, and it looks like:

**Tool Used:** `google_search` (specifically the `browse` function for URL extraction)
**Parameters:** `urls=['https://rzgfgwnpjl.a.pinggy.link/op/get/APP01']`
**Result:** `Not able to browse the provided URL. This maybe because the provided URL is blocked.`

Another attempt telling it to use the browse tools game me:

*   **Tool Used:** `google_browse`
*   **Parameters Used:** `{'urls': ['https://rzgfgwnpjl.a.pinggy.link/op/get/APP01']}`
*   **Verbatim Result:** "Not able to browse the provided URL. This maybe because the provided URL is blocked."

Any ideas here? Will this simply just not work with urlContext?

2

the weird part is that when i run the same code with different model, gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-3-pro-preview,

there’s no problem when using the gemini-2.5-pro , however when i use gemini-3-pro-preview i get
url_retrieval_status=<UrlRetrievalStatus.URL_RETRIEVAL_STATUS_ERROR: ‘URL_RETRIEVAL_STATUS_ERROR’>. it’s funny cause i’m throwing in the same url

3

Hello all!

The URL Context tool only supports URLs that are publicly accessible on the Web. I updated the documentation Limitation section to make this more clear: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/url-context#limitations
Internal testing confirmed that both Gemini 2.5 and 3 were punting on this URL, you should not be seeing a discrepancy with the models. If you do, pls let us know the request/response so we can debug.

Thank you!