OpenAI: GPT-4o-mini Search Preview

GPT-4o-mini Search Preview is a text-in, text-out model from OpenAI with a 128,000-token context window and up to 16,384 completion tokens per response. It does not support tool use, reasoning modes, or structured output, which narrows its fit to straightforward text generation and search-oriented tasks rather than agentic or data-extraction workflows. At $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, it sits at the budget end of the GPT-4o family, making it worth considering for high-volume, cost-sensitive deployments where search-augmented text generation is the primary need. The trade-off is that there is currently no independent benchmark coverage, so performance relative to competing models at this price tier is unproven. Buyers who need validated quality benchmarks before committing should treat it as an exploratory option until third-party evaluations become available.