Source Policy

The Source Policy feature allows you to precisely control which domains Parallel processors can access during web research and to apply a freshness constraint. It’s available for both Tasks and Web Tools and lets you tailor search results by specifying domains to include or exclude and by setting a start date so results are limited to recent content.

Source policies can significantly reduce result quality by excluding relevant pages from retrieval. Use include_domains and exclude_domains only when absolutely necessary — for compliance-bound corpora, tasks that require a single known publisher, or when specific sources must be blocked. When you only want to prefer certain sources, steer in the objective instead (e.g., “prefer official documentation”).

Configuration

You can configure source control by setting the following parameters:

Parameter	Type	Supported	Description
`include_domains`	array[string]	Task API, Search API	List of domains to allow. Only sources from these domains will be included in results. The combined number of domains in `include_domains` and `exclude_domains` cannot exceed 200.
`exclude_domains`	array[string]	Task API, Search API	List of domains to block. Sources from these domains will be excluded from results. The combined number of domains in `include_domains` and `exclude_domains` cannot exceed 200.
`after_date`	string<date>	Search API	Optional start date for filtering results. Results are limited to content published on or after this date. Provided as an RFC 3339 date string (`YYYY-MM-DD`).

Specifying an apex domain such as example.com will automatically include all its subdomains (e.g., www.example.com, blog.example.com, api.example.com).

Domain Limit

Hard limit: Combined total of 200 domains per request. You can specify up to 200 domains in total across include_domains and exclude_domains. Exceeding this limit will raise a validation error.

Example

curl -X POST "https://api.parallel.ai/v1/tasks/runs" \
  -H "x-api-key: $PARALLEL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
      "input": "How many employees does Parallel Web Systems have?",
      "processor": "core",
      "source_policy": {
        "include_domains": ["linkedin.com"]
      }
    }'

curl https://api.parallel.ai/v1/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "x-api-key: $PARALLEL_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "objective": "Which open source LLMs were released recently and how do they benchmark?",
    "search_queries": ["open source LLMs"],
    "advanced_settings": {
      "source_policy": {
        "exclude_domains": ["reddit.com"],
        "after_date": "2026-01-01"
      }
    }
  }'

Best Practices

Use either include_domains or exclude_domains in a single query. Specifying exclude_domains is redundant when include_domains is set, as only include_domains will be applied.
Use an apex domain such as example.com to match that domain and all its subdomains, or specify a subdomain such as docs.example.com to match that subdomain and any deeper subdomains. A leading www. is normalized away.
Use a bare domain extension beginning with a period, such as .org, .gov, or .co.uk, to match that extension. Literal wildcard syntax such as *.org is not supported.
Do not include schemes (http://, https://), paths (example.com/blog), or ports (example.com:443).
Although there is a maximum limit of 200 domains, carefully using specific and targeted domains will give better results.

Getting started

Web Tools

Web Agents

Developer Tools

Platform Integrations

Data Integrations

Additional Resources

Configuration

Domain Limit

Example

Best Practices

​Configuration

​Domain Limit

​Example

​Best Practices

Configuration

Domain Limit

Example

Best Practices