Free web search APIs for AI agents: what each free tier really gives

Which free tier suits a hobby agent?

One that needs no card and returns some page text. On those two criteria, Tavily's 1,000 monthly credits and Exa's $10 monthly grant are the easiest starts, as read on October 22, 2026. Tavily can add raw page content to results; Exa's auto search includes text for the first ten results.

You.com's keyless MCP is handy for trying search inside an MCP client: 100 queries a day with no account. LangSearch is free with page text capped at 5,000 characters per result by default. Both suit experiments more than products.

What are the catches?

Four come up again and again:

• A card on file. Brave asks for one "to prevent abuse", and Parallel's monthly credit goes to organisations "with a credit card".
• Monthly resets. Tavily, Exa and Parallel reset or expire free credit each month, so unused searches are lost.
• Usage terms. Jina's free tokens are for non-commercial use only. Brave's default terms forbid storing results or training models on them.
• Throughput. LangSearch allows 5 requests per second, and keyless MCP endpoints cap daily use.

None of these is a problem for a weekend project. Each one matters once an agent serves users.

Is self-hosting SearXNG a free alternative?

It is free software, not a free service. SearXNG is a metasearch engine released under the AGPL-3.0 licence. It sends your queries to public search engines and merges their results.

That design has limits. It returns titles, links and snippets but no page text. Its own documentation says it "is thus classified as a bot itself" by the engines it queries, which then limit or suspend it. For a personal setup it works; for an agent in production it is fragile.

What should I avoid when looking for free search?

Three shortcuts cause more trouble than they save. Shared or leaked API keys break the vendor's terms and get revoked, often mid-project. Scraping a search engine's result pages from your own servers runs into its terms and its rate limits. Free trials opened again and again under new accounts get closed.

If the free tiers above are too small, a small paid pack is usually cheaper than the time spent working around limits.

Why does LLMWebSearch have no free tier?

Because every search we run costs us a live search and up to three page reads. Instead of a monthly allowance that expires, we sell small packs that do not. There is no free tier: the 5,000-search pack is the way to try it, bought from the minimum top-up; whatever you added only to reach that minimum comes back on request within 30 days, in USDT or USDC, as long as it is unspent.

The smallest pack, 5,000 searches for $9.25, lasts a hobby agent several months. There is no card to enter and no ID to upload. See pricing for every pack.