Web search API alternatives
One page per provider, with its price, index position, funding and the alternatives worth considering. Figures come from each vendor's own pages, dated.
Verified 5 August 2026·All figures from primary sources
Before you compare
Which kind of search API do you need?
Comparing across categories on price is how teams end up rebuilding six months later. Settle the category first; four of these five answers are not us.
Pick the branch that describes you.
- Ifyou need Google's own ranking, exactly as a person would see it
Nothing else returns Google’s results. They also inherit the deprecation and pricing risk of the engine behind them.
- Ifyou already build on Gemini or Azure and want nothing extra to integrate
Nothing to wire up if you are already there; no control over the index or the price if you are not.
- Ifyou already have the URLs and need clean page text
Essential in most stacks, and they need something to hand them the URLs.
- Ifyou want the provider to research the question and write the answer
You buy the provider’s judgement, on its models, priced per task.
- Ifyour own model should reason over evidence that carries provenance, independence and a receipt
The evidence layer beneath whichever model you run, from an index we own.
Own-index search APIs
These vendors crawl and index the web themselves. Nobody upstream can deprecate them, reprice them or rate-limit them.
Exa alternatives
$7/1kNeural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Parallel Search alternatives
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Brave Search API alternatives
$5/1kA 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
Mojeek alternatives
A UK independent crawler and index, running since 2004. Small by comparison, but genuinely its own — and the oldest independent index still standing.
Platform grounding
Search bundled into a model platform. Nothing to integrate if you are already there, and no control over retrieval if you are not.
Grounding with Google Search alternatives
$14/1kGoogle'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.
Perplexity Sonar alternatives
$14/1kSearch and synthesis in one call. You get an answer rather than results, which is convenient until you need to control retrieval yourself.
Grounding with Bing Search alternatives
Microsoft's designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.
Bing Web Search API alternatives
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
OpenAI web search tool alternatives
The built-in search tool in the Responses API. Zero integration work if you are already on OpenAI, and no control over retrieval whatsoever.
Retrieval layers
These sit on top of other search providers and add cleaning, ranking and citation. Convenient, with someone else’s index underneath.
Tavily alternatives
$8/1kAn 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
Linkup alternatives
A French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.
Valyu alternatives
A London deep-search API spanning web plus licensed proprietary sources, with content attribution and pay-per-use monetisation for publishers.
SERP resellers
These return results from Google or Bing. Cheap and familiar, but the product exists at the pleasure of a search engine that does not want it to.
SerpAPI alternatives
$25/1kThe mature multi-engine SERP API. Returns real Google, Bing and Baidu result pages with all their features — at SERP-scraping prices.
Serper alternatives
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
DataForSEO alternatives
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Google Custom Search JSON API alternatives
$5/1kGoogle's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.
Crawl & extraction
These turn a URL into clean text. Essential in most stacks, but they need something to hand them the URLs.
Firecrawl alternatives
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.
Jina Reader alternatives
Prefix any URL and get clean markdown back. The lowest-friction extraction tool there is, and priced per token rather than per page.
Diffbot alternatives
One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.
Bright Data alternatives
Proxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
How to read an alternatives page
Each page profiles one provider and then lists what you would realistically move to, ranked by category first and price second. We appear on all of them, and we say so rather than presenting ourselves as a neutral finding. Every figure on every page carries a dated link to the vendor's own source; where a vendor publishes no comparable per-1,000 rate, the field is empty and a note explains why rather than carrying an estimate.
The category matters more than the price. A SERP reseller, a retrieval layer, an extraction tool and an own-index API fail in genuinely different ways, and swapping across categories on headline rate is how teams end up rebuilding six months later. Thelandscape page sets out the five categories with the same sources behind them.
Why anyone is looking
Three things moved this market in eighteen months: the Bing Web Search API was retired outright in August 2025, Brave replaced its perpetual free developer tier with a monthly credit in February 2026, and Tavily was acquired the same month. None of those changed an HTTP signature much, and all three sent teams shopping. Themigration guides handle the three most common moves parameter by parameter.
Before committing to whatever comes next, it is worthmeasuring coverage against your own URLs rather than against a claim about index size. Coverage is a relation between an index and your workload, and only you hold the second half of it.
The cheapest own-index option is $0.40 per 1,000
Start free, run your own queries, and decide from results rather than from a comparison table — including ours.