Search Connected Apps

Search Connected Apps

Search Connected Apps lets your workflow query external applications — like Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, or Slack — in real time, directly from an LLM node. Unlike a Knowledge Base, there is no indexing step: Stack AI searches the live content in your connected accounts at run time and passes the results straight to the model.

Use this when you need up-to-date information from files or messages that change frequently, or when you don't want to maintain a separate index.

Supported apps

App	What it searches
Google Drive	Files and documents in your Drive (full-text search)
OneDrive	Files in your OneDrive (Microsoft Graph Search)
SharePoint	Files and list items in SharePoint sites
Slack	Messages across channels you have access to

Adding a connected app to an LLM node

1. Open a workflow and click on the LLM node to open its settings panel.

2. Scroll to the Knowledge Sources section and click Add Knowledge Sources.

3. Select Search Connected Apps from the dropdown.

4. A provider picker opens — select the app you want to search (e.g. Google Drive).

5. Choose an existing connection from the list, or click Add connection to create a new one.

6. The app appears as a card under Connected Apps in the node settings.

Repeat steps 3–6 to add multiple apps. The node will search all of them in parallel at run time.

Managing connections

Each connected app appears as a card in the Connected Apps section of the node settings. From the card you can:

• Remove the connection (trash icon) — the app will no longer be searched by this node.

• Switch connection (settings icon) — swap the connection without removing the app from the node. Useful if you have multiple accounts for the same provider.

Using the tool in your prompt

When you add a connected app to an LLM node, Stack AI automatically makes a Search Connected Apps tool available to the model. For the model to actually use it, you need to reference it in the Instructions — otherwise the model may answer from its training knowledge without ever querying your connected apps.

Tell the model explicitly when and how to use the tool. For example:

"When the user asks a question, use the Search Connected Apps tool to look up relevant information from their Google Drive before answering. Always base your answer on the search results."

You can also be more specific about the query strategy:

"Use the Search Connected Apps tool with a short 2–3 word keyword query that captures the core topic of the user's question. If the first search returns no useful results, try a different keyword."

If you don't instruct the model to use the tool, it may skip the search entirely and respond from its own knowledge. It is good practice to include an explicit instruction.

How the search works

When the workflow runs, the node automatically generates a keyword search query from the conversation context and sends it to each connected app simultaneously. For each result, Stack AI fetches the content — downloading and extracting text from binary files like PDFs or Word documents as needed — and passes the enriched chunks to the model with source citations.

Output

Field	Type	Description
results	Object array	The search results with extracted content
query	String	The search query that was used
sources_searched	Number	Number of connections that were successfully searched
extraction_errors	String array	Files that failed content extraction

If the same Google Drive folder is connected to both a Knowledge Base and a Search Connected Apps node, Stack AI will prefer the cached Knowledge Base content when available, and fall back to live search for anything not yet indexed.