Google Cloud's turnkey enterprise search and RAG platform, bridging BigQuery, Drive, Confluence, and proprietary lakehouses with Gemini-powered grounded answers
Vertex AI Search is Google's managed grounding engine: enterprise search and RAG over your documents/sites/data with Google-grade ranking, plus turnkey grounding for Gemini-based agents, the 'don't build retrieval yourself' option inside Google Cloud.
Pricing: Usage-based (queries, indexing, storage) with editions by capability; bundles into Vertex AI platform billing (published pricing, mid-2026).
Vertex buys ranking quality and zero plumbing at usage-based cost; custom stacks buy control, portability, and tuning headroom. Teams without retrieval expertise often start managed and specialize later.
Yes: ACL-aware search is supported for enterprise editions, enforcing source permissions in results, which is essential for internal deployments.