Is Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.1 Flash Lite supported with Search Grounding fully?

[andrewigk]

I'm attempting to use 3.1 and while I am getting a response with text content when providing a prompt, and the response makes it pretty clear that the Gemini API is performing a web search. But when I try to access grounding metadata, it appears to be null/empty.

Is this to be expected? Is there some change that needs to occur in the java SDK before grounding metadata is returned correctly?

Thanks in advance.

[hemasekhar-p]

Hi @andrewigk,

Thank you for reaching out. The reason you are seeing the grounding metadata as null or empty because, by default the model will not perform a live web search. To activate Search Grounding and retrieve the metadata, you need to explicitly enable the GoogleSearch tool via a GenerateContentConfig object and pass it into your generateContent call like below. Please try this approach and let us know if it resolves your problem.

GenerateContentConfig config = GenerateContentConfig.builder()
                .tools(Arrays.asList(
                        Tool.builder().googleSearch(GoogleSearch.builder().build()).build()
                ))
                .build();
        
GenerateContentResponse response = client.models.generateContent(
         GenAIConstants.MODEL,
         prompt,
         config
     );