Source policy

advanced_settings.source_policy lets you constrain a search or a research task to the sources you trust. It applies to /v1/search, /v1/task (via the underlying searches it runs), and any /v1/monitors that runs depth: deep underneath.

Fields

Filtering happens after the SERP fetch and before any LLM-based re-ranking or content extraction. Results dropped here do not consume SKU credits past the initial search.

Examples

Trust a short list of sources

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{
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  "queries": ["climate policy"],
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  "advanced_settings": {
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    "source_policy": {
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      "include_domains": ["nature.com", "science.org", "nytimes.com"]
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    }
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  }
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}

Drop common low-signal hosts

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{
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  "queries": ["best vector database 2026"],
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  "objective": "comparison of features and pricing",
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  "advanced_settings": {
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    "source_policy": {
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      "exclude_domains": ["reddit.com", "quora.com", "medium.com"]
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    }
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  }
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}

Window by recency

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{
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  "queries": ["LLM safety incidents"],
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  "category": "news",
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  "advanced_settings": {
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    "source_policy": {
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      "after_date": "2026-01-01"
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    }
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  }
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}

You can combine all four fields. Order does not matter — filtering is deterministic.

How it interacts with other settings

• freshness (hour, day, week, month, year) is a Google query-time filter that runs before the SERP returns. Use it for rough recency. Use after_date / before_date for precise windows.
• category (news, research_paper, personal_site, …) adds Google’s tbm filter or refines the query string. It is unaffected by source_policy.
• objective drives re-ranking. Re-ranking sees only the rows that survived source_policy, so the policy is a strict pre-filter.
• limit is applied last. If source_policy drops every result, you get an empty array, not a 503.

When publish dates are missing

after_date and before_date look at the publish_date field on each result. Scout extracts that from the page’s meta tags and structured data. Some sites do not publish a usable date; those results are kept by default. If you want to be strict, drop the host from include_domains or post-filter on your side.

Edge cases

• An empty include_domains: [] is treated the same as omitting the field — no filter is applied. Pass at least one host to enable the allowlist.
• Hosts are matched case-insensitive and ignore leading www..
• A leading dot (.openai.com) is accepted and means the same thing as openai.com.
• Conflicting policy (include_domains: ["openai.com"] and exclude_domains: ["openai.com"]) results in zero rows — the exclude wins.