Try
5,000 searches
$9.25
$1.85/1K searches
- Wire it into one agent
- Same API as the largest pack
- Credits never expire
Quick answer
Which web search API is best for AI agents in 2026?
Ranked by the price of 1,000 searches that return the full text of the top 3 pages, at 100,000 searches a month, Jina Search starts lowest (from $0.50, billed in tokens), then LLMWebSearch at $1.45/1K searches, Valyu at $2.99 and DeepSeek at $3.00. Tavily costs $5.00 and Exa $7.00. Brave and Perplexity return excerpts, not whole pages, at $5. Prices checked on 2026-10-22.
The 12 web search APIs for AI agents, ranked by the cost of search plus page text
-
1
Jina Search (s.jina.ai)
Returns the top 5 results with their page text in one call, billed in tokens; the published floor is 10,000 tokens per search.
Pros
- Page text of 5 results in every call
- 10M free tokens per key for non-commercial use
- Official remote MCP server
Cons
- Cost per search depends on token use
- Always 5 results
- Free tokens are non-commercial only
-
A live web search that returns up to 20 ranked results with the top 3 pages read as Markdown, on prepaid credits paid in crypto with no KYC.
Pros
- Top 3 pages as Markdown in one credit
- Credits never expire
- Reader respects robots.txt and never works around a refusal
Cons
- No free tier
- No written answer and no deep-research endpoint
- No x402 per-call payment
-
3
Valyu
Bills 0.1 credit per result and includes each result's content as Markdown; also searches arXiv, SEC filings and licensed journals.
Pros
- Content for every result
- $10 free credit, $20 with a company email
- Top-ups last 12 months
Cons
- Monthly plan credits do not roll over
- Price grows with the number of results
-
4
DeepSeek Search + Fetch
Two endpoints, search and fetch, each priced per 1,000 successful requests; billing starts on November 1, 2026.
Pros
- Low per-call price
- Free through DeepSeek's harness, Claude Code or Codex until November 1, 2026
Cons
- Two calls for search plus page text
- Result format and payment terms not checked
-
5
Firecrawl /search
A search endpoint that can scrape every result to full-page Markdown, inside the wider Firecrawl scraping platform.
Pros
- 1,000 free credits a month, no card
- Keyless MCP within daily limits
- Large integration list
Cons
- Plan credits reset monthly
- Each scraped page adds a credit
-
6
Parallel
Search for agents that takes an objective plus a few queries and returns Markdown excerpts; full pages come from its Extract endpoint.
Pros
- Free Search MCP with no API key
- Excerpts in every result
- Deep-research Task API
Cons
- Whole pages need a second call
- Monthly free credit needs a card
-
The best-known search API for agents, now owned by Nebius, with search depths, an optional written answer, extract, crawl and research endpoints.
Pros
- 1,000 free credits a month
- Official MCP with keyless Search and Extract
- Built-in OpenClaw provider
Cons
- Plan credits reset on the 1st of each month
- Advanced depth costs 2 credits
-
8
Exa
Search on Exa's own index, with the text of the first 10 results included in auto search since March 3, 2026.
Pros
- Own index
- $10 free each month
- Keyless hosted MCP
Cons
- Same price at every volume
- Lite mode never fetches live pages
-
9
Linkup
Standard and deep search with a sourced-answer option; full pages come from a separate fetch call.
Pros
- $20 a month free with a work email
- x402 without an account
- Official n8n node
Cons
- Deep search is $50 per 1,000
- x402 price is about twice the card price
-
10
You.com Web Search
Up to 100 results per call; page content is free when cached and billed only for pages crawled live.
Pros
- 100 keyless MCP queries a day
- Up to 100 results per call
- $10 free credit
Cons
- Content price depends on cache hits
- Credit expiry not stated
-
Search on Perplexity's own index, returning extracted snippets sized by a token budget, at a flat price per request.
Pros
- Failed requests not billed
- No token charges
- Zero-day retention of prompts by default
Cons
- No full-page text in the Search API
- No free tier stated
-
Results from Brave's own independent index; the LLM Context endpoint returns extracted page chunks for models.
Pros
- Own index with no fallback engine
- Credits valid one year
- Official MCP server (MIT)
Cons
- Default terms forbid storing results and AI training
- Card required to start
Disclosure: this page is published by LLMWebSearch. Competitor details come from their public websites at the date shown above and may have changed since.
How did we rank these search APIs?
We ranked them by what an agent pays to read the pages behind its results. An agent that only gets snippets usually calls a second tool to fetch the page. That second call often costs more than the search itself.
So every price above is normalised to one unit: one search with at least 5 results, plus the full text of the top 3 pages, at 100,000 searches a month. Where an API needs two calls, both are counted. We used each vendor's own pricing page, read on 2026-10-22, and the least expensive self-serve combination of plan and published rate.
Two APIs return only excerpts, not whole pages: Brave and Perplexity. They come last, because they price a different unit. Some APIs return more page text than 3 pages: Exa includes text for 10 results, Jina and Valyu for 5. The full price table shows 10,000, 100,000 and 1 million searches a month, and the price index gives the raw data.
Which search API fits which kind of agent?
Price is only one axis. Each option above wins somewhere:
- Semantic search on an own index: Exa. It searches by meaning, filters by category and returns up to 100 results.
- An independent index with strict data rules: Brave. Its results never come from another engine.
- Free trials with no API key: Parallel's Search MCP, Exa's hosted MCP, You.com's free MCP profile and Tavily's keyless access. See the MCP comparison.
- Deep research in one call: Parallel's Task API, Tavily's research endpoint and Exa's deep search.
- Per-call payment in USDC with no account: Tavily, Exa, Linkup, You.com and Parallel accept x402.
- Prepaid credits bought with Bitcoin, USDT or other coins, with no card and no documents: LLMWebSearch. No other API we checked sells crypto-funded prepaid credits.
- Academic and financial sources next to the web: Valyu.
What changed in web search APIs in 2026?
Prices moved a lot this year. The dated changes we confirmed on vendor pages and filings:
- 2026-02-12: Brave introduced its current plans, $5 per 1,000 requests with a $5 monthly credit.
- 2026-02-19: Nebius completed its purchase of Tavily, according to its Q1 2026 financial statements.
- 2026-03-03: Exa lowered its prices and began including text for the first 10 results.
- 2026-04-01: Exa retired its
/researchendpoint. - 2026-09: Perplexity added Fast Search at $1 per 1,000 requests.
- 2026-10-17: DeepSeek priced its Search and Fetch API at $0.75 per 1,000 calls each, billed from November 1.
- 2026-10-19: Exa launched
litesearch at $4 per 1,000, on cached content.
Two older changes still push teams to switch. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 2025-08-11. Google's Custom Search JSON API ends for existing customers on 2027-01-01.
How do model providers' built-in search tools compare?
They cost more per call and usually hide the raw pages. OpenAI's web search tool and Claude's web search tool cost $10 per 1,000 calls, plus the retrieved content billed as input tokens. Gemini 3 grounding costs $14 per 1,000 queries after 5,000 free a month. Grounding with Bing costs $14 per 1,000 transactions and does not hand results to other applications.
A standalone API returns the results and the pages to you. Your agent then decides how much text to send to the model. Our built-in tools comparison has the full table and a worked example.
What does LLMWebSearch cost?
5,000 searches cost $9.25, 100,000 searches cost $145 and 1,000,000 searches cost $1,200, as of October 2026. One credit pays for one search: up to 20 ranked results, with the pages of the first 3 read and returned as Markdown. Reading 4 to 10 pages makes it 2 credits. A call that ends in an error costs nothing.
Builder
25,000 searches
$41.25
$1.65/1K searches
- A coding agent or a research assistant
- MCP, LangChain and n8n ready
- Credits never expire
Production
100,000 searches
$145
$1.45/1K searches
- Agents in production
- Higher rate limit on request
- Credits never expire
Best rate
Volume
1,000,000 searches
$1,200
$1.20/1K searches
- Platforms serving many agents
- Higher rate limit on request
- Credits never expire
In every plan: Top 3 pages read as Markdown · Country, language, time and domain filters · Failed calls not charged · Credits never expire
Questions about web search APIs for agents
Which web search API costs least per search?
Per bare search, DeepSeek charges $0.75 per 1,000 and Parallel and Perplexity Fast $1. Counting the text of the top 3 pages, Jina starts at $0.50 in tokens, LLMWebSearch costs $1.45/1K searches at 100,000 a month, and Valyu $2.99. Prices read on 2026-10-22.
Do I need full page text, or are snippets enough?
Snippets are enough to pick links. To answer a detailed question and cite it, the model usually needs the page itself. That is why this ranking counts the cost of the top 3 pages, not only the search.
Which search APIs can I pay for in crypto?
Tavily, Exa, Linkup, You.com and Parallel take USDC per call through x402, with no account. Desearch takes TAO top-ups. LLMWebSearch sells prepaid credits paid in BTC, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL, LTC, with no card and no KYC.
Is this ranking independent?
No. SerpGoat LLC publishes it and sells LLMWebSearch, which is on the list. We used one stated criterion for every entry, linked each vendor's pricing page and said where each competitor does better.
Sources (13)
- Tavily API credits docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits — Tavily (read 2026-10-22)
- Exa pricing exa.ai/pricing — Exa (read 2026-10-22)
- Exa changelog: pricing update exa.ai/docs/changelog/pricing-update — Exa (read 2026-10-22)
- Brave Search API brave.com/search/api — Brave Software (read 2026-10-22)
- Perplexity Search API overview docs.perplexity.ai/docs/search/overview.md — Perplexity (read 2026-10-22)
- Parallel pricing parallel.ai/pricing — Parallel Web Systems (read 2026-10-22)
- Linkup pricing docs.linkup.so/pages/documentation/development/pricing — Linkup (read 2026-10-22)
- You.com API pricing you.com/pricing — You.com (read 2026-10-22)
- Jina Reader and Search jina.ai/reader — Jina AI (read 2026-10-22)
- Firecrawl search docs.firecrawl.dev/features/search — Firecrawl (read 2026-10-22)
- Valyu pricing docs.valyu.ai/pricing — Valyu (read 2026-10-22)
- DeepSeek API pricing — DeepSeek (read 2026-10-22)
- Nebius Q1 2026 financial statements (exhibit) — U.S. SEC EDGAR (read 2026-10-22)