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Customer signals don’t exist in isolation. Sometimes you need external context alongside your internal data — what competitors are shipping, how the market is shifting, or which trends explain a pattern you’re seeing. Web search lets you pull in external sources within a single Chat conversation, without leaving Dovetail. Ask Chat to look up a competitor’s latest product announcement, find industry benchmarks, or surface recent coverage tied to a trend in your data. How teams use this:
  • Competitor context — compare what your customers are saying with what competitors are shipping, in one place.
  • External validation — support emerging themes with third-party sources and published benchmarks.
  • Market signals — layer in industry or macro trends to strengthen your interpretation of internal data.
Video highlights playing inline in a Chat conversation

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External MCP in chat

Sometimes the answer — or the action — isn’t in Dovetail. It’s in Slack, Linear, or Salesforce. Chat can connect to the tools your team already uses, so you can pull in outside context or take action, all without leaving the conversation. Turn a customer complaint straight into a Linear issue. Ask Chat to check a Slack thread for context. Update a Salesforce record based on what you just learned from a call. Connect a tool Open the tools menu next to the message box in Chat. From there:
  • Connect any of the built-in tools — Linear, Notion, Hex, Canva, Gmail, Slack, or Salesforce — with a one-click sign-in.
  • Add custom MCP if the tool you want isn’t in the list. Paste in the server URL and give it a name, and it shows up alongside the others.
Once connected, toggle a tool on or off for any given conversation from the same menu.

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FAQs

When web search is enabled, Chat uses Google’s search and grounding technology to find and summarize relevant information from the web. Here’s what that means in practice:
  • Google’s systems may review up to 20 web pages per search request.
  • Chat does not read or store raw webpage HTML directly.
  • Instead, Chat receives a short AI-generated summary of relevant content, along with source titles and links for citations.
  • Each web search response is limited to a concise summary (approximately 2,000 characters).
  • A single response may involve multiple web searches if additional context is needed.
Web retrieval and processing are handled by the underlying search provider, and these limits may change over time.