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# How to Give Hermes Agent Real-Time Web Search Results
- URL: https://serpapi.com/blog/how-to-give-hermes-agent-real-time-web-search-results/
- Published: 2026-09-23T07:05:49.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T07:20:27.000Z
- Description: Learn how to use Hermes Agent for real-time web search, monitoring, and research workflows.
- Author: Srujana Maddula
- Tags: AI, AI Agents

Ask an AI agent about something that happened this morning, a stock price, a breaking headline, or a product launch. Without access to real-time data, it either admits it doesn't know or, worse, gives you a confident answer that is completely wrong.

That's the problem with AI agents that can't access the live web: they only know what the model learned during training. Hermes Agent's built-in web tools solve this. They let Hermes access live web data and use it for research, real-time monitoring, and scheduled tasks.

In this post, I'll walk you through how to connect Hermes Agent to real-time web search, how its web tools work, and a few practical use cases.

## What is Hermes Agent?

[Hermes Agent](https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent) is an autonomous AI agent that isn't tied to any IDE. You can run it on your laptop for local tasks or host it on a virtual server so it keeps running around the clock.

Hermes has a built-in learning loop. It creates and updates its own skills as it works through your requests. Say you ask it to build a Python chatbot. To do that, it might create files, edit code, run tests, and fix whatever breaks along the way. Hermes then turns what it learns from that process into a skill it can reuse later.

A week later, when you ask it to add a feature or deploy the app as a Docker container, it won't make you re-explain your stack from scratch. It recalls the project context from its persistent memory and reuses the skill it built the first time around. Over time, this compounds, every session adds to what Hermes knows about your setup, preferences, and workflows, so its understanding keeps deepening with each conversation.

Hermes Agent works anywhere. Connect it to Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, or your terminal. You can start a conversation on Telegram, and pick it up later from your Mac. If you host it on an always-on server, you can chat over WhatsApp or trigger a workflow via Slack, even when your laptop is off.

## How do Hermes Agent web tools work?

Hermes Agent has two web tools: `web_search` and `web_extract`. The `web_search` tool searches the web and gives the search results to the agent, while `web_extract` extracts the web page content and provides that context to Hermes Agent.

Basically, Hermes Agent exposes these tools to the AI model. The model then decides when to call a tool, passes in a search query, gets the results back, and uses those results in the next steps of the task.

For example, say you ask Hermes, “What are the latest AI trends?”.The model sees that `web_search` tool is available, along with the arguments "query" and "limit".

The "limit" parameter defines the maximum number of search results the tool returns in a single call. "query" is the search query (whether that's the original user's query or an agent-refined query) that gets passed to the search provider.

The model then generates a structured tool call, something like this:

```JSON
{
  "name": "web_search",
  "arguments": {
    "query": "latest AI agent developments",
    "limit": 5
  }
}

```

Hermes Agent then executes this tool call. Each result comes back with a title, URL, description, and position in the ranking.

For this to work, you need to configure Hermes Agent with a backend provider that performs the actual search and returns the results. SerpApi offers 250 free searches per month. So you can [configure web\_search to use SerpApi](https://serpapi.com/blog/introducing-serpapis-hermes-agent-plugin/), and whenever Hermes Agent makes that tool call, SerpApi searches the web and returns the results to the agent.

Hermes Agent also ships with [browser tools](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/features/browser). Suppose you need to fill in a form to get the content, click a button to go to the next page, or scroll to load more content. Hermes provides tools like `browser_navigate`, `browser_snapshot`, `browser_click`, `browser_type`, `browser_scroll`, and `browser_vision`.

`browser_navigate` opens the specified URL and initializes the browser session. Then `browser_snapshot` captures the interactive elements on the page and assigns them reference IDs, like `@e1` and `@e2`. Hermes can then use those IDs with tools like `browser_click` or `browser_scroll` to interact with the page. Like web tools, you need to configure these browser tools with the supported backend providers like Browserbase, Browser Use, or others.

## Choosing the right web search provider for Hermes Agent

You can configure the `web_search` and `web_extract` tools with any supported provider, and they don't have to be the same one. You could use one provider for search and another one for extraction. SerpApi, Firecrawl, Tavily, and Brave Search are some popular providers you can use with Hermes.

The main difference between providers is where the results come from and how they're shaped for the agent. SerpApi returns live results from Google, the same ones a person would see in their browser, instead of results from a separate search index. The [SerpApi plugin](https://serpapi.com/blog/introducing-serpapis-hermes-agent-plugin/) also goes beyond general web search. It adds dedicated tools that Hermes picks automatically based on your request:

- `web_search` uses the [Google Light API](https://serpapi.com/google-light-api) for general queries, chosen for its compact responses and low latency.
- `serpapi_maps_search` pulls [Google Maps](https://serpapi.com/google-maps-api) results with addresses, ratings, and review counts for queries like "coffee shops near me."
- `serpapi_news_search` pulls [Google News](https://serpapi.com/google-news-light-api) results with publishers and dates.
- `serpapi_shopping_search` pulls [Google Shopping](https://serpapi.com/google-shopping-light-api) results with prices and merchants.

Each tool returns only the fields Hermes needs, rather than a full raw response, which keeps the agent's context window lean. All four run on a single API key.

| Backend search provider | web\_search | web\_extract | Free tier               | Best for                                                                               |
| ----------------------- | ----------- | ------------ | ----------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| SerpApi                 | Yes         | No           | 250 free searches/month | Google Search, Maps, News, and Shopping results in Markdown format for AI applications |
| Firecrawl               | Yes         | Yes          | 500 credits/month       | Generic research                                                                       |
| Brave Search            | Yes         | No           | 2,000 queries/month     | Lightweight generic search                                                             |
| Tavily                  | Yes         | Yes          | Keyless option          | Pre-chunked, ready-to-use data for AI                                                  |
| Exa                     | Yes         | Yes          | Keyless free tier       | Semantic search to find relevant web pages                                             |
| Perplexity              | Yes         | Yes          | Paid                    | Pre-summarized answers instead of raw pages                                            |

## Power your Hermes AI agent with real-time web search

You should already have Hermes Agent installed before connecting it to web search. If you're on a Mac, install it with a simple curl command:

```
curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash
```

It's also available on Windows or virtual servers. Follow this [quick installation guide](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/getting-started/installation) to install it in your preferred environment.

Once Hermes Agent is active, connect it to the [open-source SerpApi plugin](https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-hermes-plugin) to give it real-time web search access.

Just go to Hermes chat mode and type:

```
Install and configure serpapi-hermes-plugin by following the instructions at:
https://github.com/serpapi/serpapi-hermes-plugin#ask-hermes-to-install-it
```

Hermes Agent will install and configure the plugin for you. It then asks for your SerpApi API key. If you don't have one yet, sign up for a SerpApi account and [get your API key from the dashboard](https://serpapi.com/dashboard). Once you have it, paste it into the terminal.

To see if it works, I asked, “What is the current NVIDIA stock price?” and it returned the price accurately for that day.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/a5/00/a5004977-0dd2-4bcd-9292-dd0e05d4c59e/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-f4d42ed3-02fe-4fac-90b5-5e258e1e63bb.png)

Hermes Agent real-time web search

It’s not just for one-off questions. You can also schedule recurring workflows using simple natural language prompts. For example, you can ask, “Give me news updates every morning,” and Hermes will create a cron job to run the workflow and deliver the updates to you every day.

## Hermes Agent use cases

Hermes Agent [handles everything](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-stories) from serious coding to creating bedtime stories for your kids. I've picked out a few use cases where Hermes excels.

### AI research agent

Hermes Agent's web search and extraction tools let it search the web in real time, analyze the information, summarize content, and pull out key insights. The engine you point it at shapes the results. For a broad question, Hermes starts with [SerpApi Google Search](https://serpapi.com/google-light-api) to find relevant pages. For academic topics, [Google Scholar](https://serpapi.com/google-scholar-api) returns papers and citations. For anything that happened this week, [Google News API](https://serpapi.com/google-news-light-api) surfaces recent coverage that general search results might bury.

So you can give Hermes a research task, and it can work through the web, gather information, and bring back the findings without you having to guide it through every step.

### Competitor research

Freeze a watchlist of competitors, their domains, and a list of what you want to track: new hires, product launches, pricing changes, or major announcements. Then ask Hermes, “Every Monday morning, monitor these competitors and save the updates in a Markdown file.” Hermes Agent creates a cron job that runs this workflow automatically every Monday.

### Cold outreach

Ask Hermes to scrape the internet for doctors in Boston, find leads who don’t have a website, and return 10 qualified leads to pitch your web development service.

Hermes spawns multiple parallel agents, scrapes [Google Maps results](https://serpapi.com/google-maps-api), filters for qualified leads, then searches for their websites in Google Search, and returns their profiles and customized pitch angles for each of them.

## Conclusion

SerpApi's Google Search, Maps, News, and Shopping APIs provide real-time data across web results, local places, breaking news, and product prices. Connect them through the SerpApi plugin, and Hermes pulls the live information it needs and provide that context to the LLM. Since [SerpApi](https://serpapi.com/) offers 250 free searches per month, set up the SerpApi plugin as your search provider and power Hermes Agent with real-time web access.