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Mar 28, 2026Vercel AI Gateway adds first-party web search and image generation
One key, one API. Search-grounded answers and Flux 2 image generation now route through the Gateway with the same auth, billing, and observability surface as text models.
Vercel’s AI Gateway shipped two notable additions: first-party web search and image generation. Both work through the same `generateText` / `generateImage` calls in the AI SDK, just with new model identifiers (`gateway/web-search`, `flux/flux-2-pro`).
Web search is interesting because it bypasses provider-specific search tools (Anthropic’s `web_search`, OpenAI’s browsing). The Gateway runs the search itself, citing sources in a structured response. For products that already grounded answers via a separate search API, this collapses two integrations into one.
Image generation is more about pricing and unification than novel capability. Flux 2 Pro, Recraft V3, and Imagen all route through the same key. For teams running both text and image workflows, it removes one more credential to manage and keeps usage analytics in a single dashboard.
No markup remains the gateway’s structural advantage. Tokens cost what they would cost direct from the provider; image generations match the upstream rate. The product is the unified surface, not arbitrage.
Source
vercel.com/changelog