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Research

For users3 min readReviewed Nov 1, 2026
On this page
  1. Turn it on
  2. What happens
  3. Where it is available
  4. Related

Turn on Research when a question deserves an investigation rather than a quick answer: a market scan, a comparison of competitors, a due-diligence question, what changed in a regulation and what it means for you. Strata plans the question, works on its parts in parallel, reads the sources themselves, and answers with a report in which every claim names its source.

#Turn it on

  • Click the plus button (+) on the left of the input and choose Research. The row is purple, with a telescope and a tick, while it is on; Web search, just under it, is blue when it is on, so the two never read as one.
  • It stays on for every message in this chat until you turn it off. A new chat, or opening another chat, starts with it off.
  • Research looks things up on the web, so its messages use web search under the same rules as the Web search switch, whether or not that switch is on. If your organization has web search off, Research works from your own sources and what the AI already knows, and says so.

#What happens

  1. A plan. Strata splits your question into three to six sub-questions and shows them as a short list before it starts. If the question is truly ambiguous, it asks you one clarifying question first.
  2. The work. Where your organization allows sub-agents, each sub-question gets its own, and they run in parallel; you can follow them in the workspace panel. Otherwise Strata works through the sub-questions itself, one after another. On the web it searches more than once per sub-question, reads the pages themselves rather than search snippets, and prefers primary sources (a company's own filing, an agency's own page, the study itself). It also searches your own sources where they bear on the question: your mail, OneDrive files, SharePoint, Teams messages, Jira, Confluence, your organization's knowledge base, the project's files or the connected database, whichever this chat can use. Research does not stop to ask you about pages. A sub-agent opens the pages its searches returned and any address you gave; an address it wrote itself, even one in its task, is not opened, and it searches for that page instead. If a source still cannot be read, the report says so under what remains uncertain.
  3. A check. Where sources disagree, the report says so, which it trusts more and why. Where nothing reliable answers a sub-question, it says that instead of guessing.
  4. The report. The answer first, in a few sentences; then a section for each sub-question; then what remains uncertain. Every factual claim carries a footnote naming its source (hover the number to see it), and only sources that were actually read are cited.

Research takes longer than a normal answer, often a few minutes, and uses more of your organization's AI budget, because it runs several searches, and often several sub-agents, for one question. To share the report, ask for it as a file afterwards ("make this a PDF").

#Where it is available

Research is in the Strata web app. The Outlook add-in, Teams and scheduled agents answer as they always do.

  • Web search: what the web can and cannot reach, and your organization's rules for it
  • Sub-agents: how parallel work runs and how to follow it