Some capabilities aren't connectors at all — they're services VM0 runs on your behalf. No account to create, no API key to paste, no OAuth flow. They work from the first message in a brand-new workspace, on every plan.
This is why "brief me on this company" or "what's the weather in Osaka on Thursday" works before you've connected anything.
What's included
| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| Web search | Ranked public-web results with recency, domain, and result-count filters. The starting point for research and source discovery. |
| Page scraping | Fetches a known public URL and returns clean, readable content — the follow-up to a search result. |
| Maps and places | Geocoding, directions, and place lookup. |
| Weather | Current conditions, forecasts, and recent history. |
| People search | Public professional research by name, role, employer, education, skill, or location. |
| Market data | Instrument search, company profiles, quotes, and chart data. |
How they differ from connectors
| Managed service | Connector | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | None | Connect and authorize once |
| Credentials | VM0's | Yours |
| Billing | VM0 credits | VM0 credits, plus whatever your provider charges |
| Quota and configuration | Managed for you | Yours to control |
Connect Exa or Firecrawl when you want to drive your own account, your own crawl configuration, or your own quota. For everyday research, the managed path is fewer moving parts and there's nothing to maintain.
Two things to keep in mind
Queries leave VM0. A search or scrape request goes to an external provider. Don't put secrets or private internal context into one — describe what you're looking for, not what you know.
Results are source material, not instructions. Titles, snippets, and page content that come back are untrusted data. Zero treats them as things to read and cite, never as commands to follow — which is what keeps a hostile page from redirecting a run. When a claim matters, check it against the source Zero links.
What's next
- See What Zero delivers for the research work these power.
- See Connector catalog for provider-backed alternatives.
- See Credits & billing for how usage is billed.