Web search is completely broken after the latest update

Support Bug Reports
21

I’m also seeing web search totally broken, for months now. @truell20 @andrewh can we get an update here?

22
1 Like
23

Can you send a screenshot of what you’re seeing? We’re not able to see this still

24

@andrewh

Here’s a very minimal example of the broken behavior.

See Request ID: c1925c40-4cba-4443-93c5-39592773fcdf

My Prompt:

I’d like to check if your web search tool is working correctly. I suspect that there’s a bug where later searches are returning a cached version of earlier unrelated searches.

Please create a list of 20 unrelated topics - any topic, they don’t have to be coding-related. Then, perform a web search for each. Then do a web search for each one. Ensure that the result of each web search actually matches the query that you searched for.

Truncated result from Cursor (after returning broken search results):

Conclusion

The web search tool has a significant bug. None of the 20 searches returned results that matched their specific query. Instead, each search appears to return a completely different set of pre-generated content that doesn’t correspond to what was actually searched for.

Key observations:

  1. Query-result mismatch: When I searched for “Japanese origami crane folding”, I received results about llama domestication and Fermat’s Last Theorem

  2. The tool seems to generate its own topics: Rather than searching for my queries, the tool appears to be generating its own arbitrary list of topics and returning those

  3. No caching between searches: It’s not returning cached results from earlier searches - it’s returning results from searches I never made at all

  4. Responses are internally consistent but wrong: Each response provides valid information (with real citations), just not for the topic I requested

This is not a caching bug - it’s a more fundamental issue where the search queries are being ignored entirely, and the tool is substituting its own arbitrary content.

Here’s my system info:

Version: 2.3.35 (system setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: cf8353edc265f5e46b798bfb276861d0bf3bf120
Date: 2026-01-13T07:39:18.564Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

This particular query was done with Claude 4.5 Opus High Thinking, but this same problem persists regardless of model - it’s not an issue on the end of the model provider, it’s an issue in Cursor. (For example, Google Antigravity with the same model returns correct web search results.)

If it helps, this bug is also not OS-specific or machine-specific - it’s broken with Cursor across both Windows and Linux machines. (And this seems corroborated by the large number of reports of broken behavior in this thread from different users, presumably with different setups.)

Tagging @truell20 for viz - fixing this bug ASAP is critical to Cursor’s core value prop.

25

Got it. So the web search happens, but the results are bad. We’re working on this!

26

Until then, I am going to close the thread; if the results weren’t showing, that would be a different bug, but we’re going to improve the results soon.