AWS Bedrock AgentCore Web Search reaches Europe and Tokyo with domain and date filtering for regulated agents
Amazon Web Services expanded Bedrock AgentCore Web Search to Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) on August 19, 2026, and paired the rollout with two new query controls. Regulated-industry teams that could not previously use the feature because of data residency requirements now have a supported path to grounded web search inside their AWS environment.
What
Web Search on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore reached general availability on June 17, 2026, initially limited to US East (N. Virginia), per the AWS launch blog. The August 19 update added Europe (Ireland, eu-west-1) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo, ap-northeast-1), per the AWS What's New page.
The tool connects to Bedrock AgentCore Gateway via the Model Context Protocol. When an agent calls it, AWS returns snippets, source URLs, titles, and publication dates drawn from Amazon's own search index and structured knowledge graph. No query data passes through an external search provider. Per AWS, pricing is $7 per 1,000 queries.
The August update shipped two filtering capabilities. Runtime domain filtering lets agents constrain searches to a set of trusted domains or exclude specific ones on a per-call basis; gateway-level allowlists support up to 100 domains. Published-date filtering restricts results to a caller-specified time window using inclusive from/to date bounds, so agents working on compliance documents or time-sensitive research can discard stale results without post-processing.
Why it matters
The US East-only restriction was the decisive blocker for most EU and Asia Pacific regulated workloads. A financial services operator subject to GDPR or a healthcare team building on Japanese cloud infrastructure could not run Web Search without customer query data crossing into US infrastructure or touching a vendor outside their AWS agreement. Both concerns appear in regulated-sector AI procurement as first-round objections, and the regional expansion removes them for teams already on Bedrock.
The filtering additions make the case stronger. Domain allowlists let a compliance agent restrict its lookups to official regulators, government publications, or known-good sources, cutting the risk of returning results from unreliable or conflicting sites. Date filtering prevents a research agent from citing superseded guidance. These two controls address the two most common objections to live web grounding in production: lack of control over source selection and inability to exclude outdated material.
For builders already on Bedrock AgentCore, the change is additive. No architecture changes are required to take advantage of the new regions or the filtering API. For teams that had placed AgentCore Web Search in the "evaluate later" column because of residency concerns, the EU and Tokyo launch reopens the evaluation.
What to watch next
AWS has not confirmed availability in Asia Pacific (Sydney) or South America (Sao Paulo), both common requests in regulated-industry deployments. An integration with Amazon Q for enterprise use cases has also not been announced. Whether those two expansions arrive before the end of 2026 will indicate whether AWS treats AgentCore Web Search as a broad enterprise offering or continues a deliberate, incremental regional rollout.