Web search API alternatives

Neural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.

A suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.

A genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages, sold as a conventional search API with an LLM-context option. Long the default independent choice.

Free developer tier removed February 2026

A UK independent crawler and index, running since 2004. Small by comparison, but genuinely its own — and the oldest independent index still standing.

Google's first-party grounding for Gemini. The best index in the world, billed per search query on top of tokens, and only usable from Gemini.

Search and synthesis in one call. You get an answer rather than results, which is convenient until you need to control retrieval yourself.

Microsoft's designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.

For a decade the default independent web search API. Retired on 11 August 2025, taking Web, Image, News, Video, Entity and Custom Search with it.

Retired 11 August 2025

The built-in search tool in the Responses API. Zero integration work if you are already on OpenAI, and no control over retrieval whatsoever.

An LLM-shaped retrieval layer returning cleaned, ranked, cited chunks rather than raw SERPs. Acquired by Nebius in February 2026.

Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026

A French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.

A London deep-search API spanning web plus licensed proprietary sources, with content attribution and pay-per-use monetisation for publishers.

The mature multi-engine SERP API. Returns real Google, Bing and Baidu result pages with all their features — at SERP-scraping prices.

The cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.

Industrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.

Google's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.

Crawl, scrape and clean any URL into markdown for an LLM. A complement to a search API rather than a replacement — it needs URLs to start from.

Prefix any URL and get clean markdown back. The lowest-friction extraction tool there is, and priced per token rather than per page.

One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.

Proxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.