Frequently asked questions

An agent-first web search API running on its own index. It returns metadata-only passage hits — url, host, title, snippet, score and world-model signals — across 16 HTTP endpoints and 11 MCP tools, including six that traverse a coverage graph over the open web.

Our own. We crawl the open web ourselves and serve from the index we built. No upstream provider can deprecate, reprice or rate-limit us — which is what happened to everyone building on the Bing Web Search API before Microsoft retired it in August 2025.

Smaller than Google, and smaller than the well-funded competitors. It is bounded deliberately rather than accidentally: we admit a curated core and fill the tail on demand, optimising for precision of inclusion rather than raw size. Where something is missing, why_not will tell you.

Those all run their own index too — that stopped being a differentiator in 2026. Three things still separate us: price ($0.40 per 1,000 against $7 for Exa), six coverage-graph traversal tools nobody else offers over the open web, and an endpoint that explains why any URL is absent.

Free covers 10,000 requests a month with no card. Build is $29 for 50,000 requests, Scale $199 for 500,000, and Archive $799 for 2,000,000 — which works out at $0.40 per 1,000 queries on the larger plans.

A different cost structure, not a subsidy. We own the index, so none of our bill is a per-query fee to an upstream provider — the largest cost line for every reseller in the category. What we spend follows usage rather than index size, so margin widens with volume, and we are self-funded with no valuation the price has to grow into.

Every authenticated call — a search, a document fetch, a graph traversal, a context assembly. Health and readiness probes and the capability catalog at /describe are unauthenticated and never billed. MCP tool calls bill exactly like HTTP calls.

On the free tier, requests stop — it hard-caps, because there is no card on file and a surprise bill is worse than a clear stop. On paid plans you keep serving and usage-based overage applies at the rate shown in your console.

A typed graph over the search index — passages, hosts, stories, topics and entities, connected by how they were published and what they are about. Six API calls traverse it, letting an agent check corroboration, find authorities, build an entity brief, connect two documents, or receive a ready-packed context set.

GraphRAG and Neo4j build a knowledge graph over your documents — you supply the corpus, run entity extraction, and operate the infrastructure. The coverage graph is already built, over the open web, and queried through the same API as search. No ingestion step, nothing to operate.

No. Graph calls bill as ordinary requests, and the baked signals — centrality, community, independent source counts, in-degree — arrive on every search hit at no additional cost because they are stored fields.

Distinct hosts asserting a story, not surviving copies. When a near-duplicate is rejected at admission its host is recorded against the surviving passage, so deduplication compacts the index without destroying the corroboration signal.

Enter your email in the console. The magic link that arrives creates your account and issues your first key in one step — sign-up and sign-in are the same action. Keys look like ulb_ followed by 48 hex characters and are shown once.

Yes — 11 tools over stdio JSON-RPC, working with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and anything else that speaks the Model Context Protocol. One config block.

1 request per second on Free, 10 on Build, 50 on Scale and 200 on Archive. Free is deliberately slow rather than small — the quota is generous so you can evaluate properly, and the rate limit is what makes it unsuitable for serving real users. Limits are enforced per serving replica, so the published figure is a guaranteed floor.

101, all in a single embedding space. A query in one language retrieves relevant passages in another with no translation step. Scripts without word delimiters — Chinese, Japanese, Thai — are tokenised as character bigrams at index and query time.

Yes. Thirteen content types are assigned at index time from page structure rather than guessed from the URL, so content_type[]=docs really does exclude blogs about documentation.

Yes, and as far as we know no other search API answers that question. why_not reports whether a URL is present, was removed and for what reason — redundant, superseded, stale, access-starved, lost-replacement, tombstoned-source — or was never admitted.

You can reconstruct the evidence base by bounding the crawl-time window with from and to, provided your plan reaches back that far — 30 days on Free, one year on Build, five years on Scale, the full index on Archive.

As cryptographic hashes, with the last four characters kept for display. The plaintext is returned once at creation and cannot be recovered by you or by us, so a key listing physically cannot leak a usable credential. Lost keys are resolved by rotation.

Yes — including crawl-delay, with longest-match precedence and support for wildcards and end-anchors. Where a site blocks us we accept the coverage gap and report it through why_not rather than escalating into an arms race.