Web search APIs for AI agents — the 2026 landscape
We sell one of the products on this page, so treat the recommendations accordingly. The facts, however, are all sourced: every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement, each one linked with the date we read it. Where a vendor does not publish a comparable rate, we say so rather than estimating.
Verified 5 August 2026·All figures from primary sources
Price per 1,000 queries
Comparing prices across this market is genuinely hard: some vendors bill per request, some per credit with different credit costs per endpoint, and some per token on top of a per-request search fee. Every figure here is normalised to the same thing — one plain web search returning about ten results, with no extraction and no summarisation.
- unlob$0.40
- DataForSEO$0.60
- Parallel Search$1
- Serper$1
- Brave Search API$5
- Google Custom Search JSON API$5
- Exa$7
- Tavily$8
- Grounding with Google Search$14
- Perplexity Sonar$14
- SerpAPI$25
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 queries | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Approximately $25 per 1,000 searches on the Starter plan; the rate falls on higher-volume plans. | No Scrapes Google, Bing, Baidu and others | $25 | SerpApi pricing |
$14 per 1,000 search queries on Gemini 3.x after 5,000 free prompts per month. Gemini 2.5 models use the older scheme at $35 per 1,000. One prompt can trigger several billed queries. | Yes Google's index | $14 | Gemini API pricing |
A per-request search fee of roughly $5 to $14 per 1,000 on top of token charges ($1/$1 per million on Sonar, $3/$15 on Sonar Pro). Pro Search mode runs $14 to $22 per 1,000. | Yes Perplexity index | $14 | Perplexity API pricing |
TavilyAcquired Credit-based at $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. A basic search is 1 credit (~$8 per 1,000), an advanced search 2 credits (~$16 per 1,000), and a deep research request 4 to 250 credits. | No No publicly documented independent web index | $8 | Tavily pricing |
Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline. | Yes Proprietary AI-native semantic index | $7 | Exa pricing |
Search is $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan is $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens. | Yes 40B+ pages, no Google or Bing dependency | $5 | Brave Search API pricing |
$5 per 1,000 queries after the free allowance, capped at 10,000 queries per day. | Yes Google's index, via Programmable Search Engine | $5 | Custom Search JSON API pricing |
The Turbo search processor is $1 per 1,000; Basic and Advanced are both $5 per 1,000. The Task API, which is what most agent workloads actually use, runs $5 to $2,400 per 1,000 depending on processor. | Yes Proprietary web index and retrieval infrastructure | $1 | Parallel pricing |
$1 per 1,000 on the Starter plan, falling to about $0.30 per 1,000 at high volume. | No Google SERP wrapper | $1 | Serper pricing |
Roughly $0.60 to $1 per 1,000 SERPs depending on endpoint, priority and volume. | No SERP data collection at scale | $0.60 | DataForSEO pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
How the market got here
Two years that changed what buying a search API means. Every entry is a public announcement or a vendor's own notice.
Microsoft retired the Bing Web Search API
The whole family — Web, Image, News, Video, Entity, Autosuggest, Spell Check and Custom Search. API creation was silently disabled in March 2025, so the retirement was already irreversible by the time it was announced.
Brave retired its perpetual free developer tier
Replaced with a $5 monthly credit against paid usage. The index is unchanged; what changed is that a hobby project now needs a card on file.
Nebius Group acquired Tavily for $275 million
Tavily had raised $25M across a seed and a $20M Series A led by Insight Partners. Its search still runs on an upstream provider rather than an index it owns.
Parallel Web Systems reached a $2.0B valuation
$100M Series B led by Sequoia, bringing total raised to $230M. Founded by Parag Agrawal, and running its own index.
Exa Labs raised $250M at a $2.2B valuation
Led by Andreessen Horowitz, after an $85M Series B at $700M in September 2025 — roughly tripling the valuation in eight months.
Two things happened at once. Owning an index stopped being a differentiator — Exa, Parallel and Brave all run their own, and the two largest are capitalised at over two billion dollars each. And the cheap on-ramps closed: Bing’s API is gone, Brave’s free tier is gone, and Tavily now answers to an acquirer. The interesting question in 2026 is no longer who owns an index. It is what a given index will tell you about itself, and what it charges.
Capability matrix
Four questions that decide most architectures: does the provider control its own index, can an agent call it over MCP, can it traverse relationships between documents, and will it tell you what it left out.
| Provider | Own index | MCP | Graph traversal | Coverage transparency | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| unlob | Yes | Yes | Yes — 6 tools | Yes — why_not | 1,000 req/mo |
| Exa | Yes | Yes | No | No | $20 in credits at signup, then $10 in credits per month |
| Parallel Search | Yes | Yes | No | No | 5,000 requests per month |
| Brave Search API | Yes | Yes | No | No | $5 in monthly credits — the perpetual free tier was retired in February 2026 |
| Mojeek | Yes | No | No | No | Limited free API access on request |
| TavilyAcquired | No | Yes | No | No | 1,000 credits per month, no card required |
| Linkup | Partial | Yes | No | No | Free developer credits on signup |
| Valyu | Partial | Yes | No | No | Free credits on signup |
| SerpAPI | No | Yes | No | No | 100 searches per month |
| Serper | No | Yes | No | No | 2,500 free queries on signup |
| DataForSEO | No | No | No | No | Free trial credit |
| Google Custom Search JSON API | Yes | No | No | No | 100 queries per day |
| Grounding with Google Search | Yes | No | No | No | 5,000 prompts per month (Gemini 3.x) |
| Perplexity Sonar | Yes | Yes | No | No | API credits included with Perplexity Pro |
| Grounding with Bing Search | Yes | No | No | No | Azure free credits only |
| Bing Web Search APIRetired | Yes | No | No | No | None — retired |
| OpenAI web search tool | Partial | No | No | No | None separate from API credit |
| Firecrawl | No | Yes | No | No | 500 credits on signup |
| Jina Reader | No | No | No | No | Generous free tier, no key required for basic use |
| Diffbot | Yes | No | No | No | Two-week trial |
| Bright Data | No | Yes | No | No | Free tier on the Web MCP server |
"Graph traversal" means the API can return relationships between documents in the open web index — not that you can build a graph over your own documents with it. "Coverage transparency" means the API will tell you why a specific URL is absent.
Who is funded, and by whom
Worth knowing before you pick a dependency. Heavy funding means the provider will still be there next year; it also means the pricing you sign up on is not necessarily the pricing that has to clear a $2 billion valuation later.
| Company | Total raised | Last round | Valuation | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exa Exa Labs | $335M+ | $250M (2026) May 2026 | $2.2B | Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Lightspeed |
| Parallel Search Parallel Web Systems | $230M | $100M Series B April 2026 | $2.0B | Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures |
| Tavily Nebius Group | $25M | $20M Series A August 2025 | — | Insight Partners, Alpha Wave Global |
| Linkup Linkup | $10M+ | $10M seed February 2026 | — | Gradient, Elaia, Seedcamp |
| Firecrawl Firecrawl | $16.2M | $14.5M Series A August 2025 | — | Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Tobias Lütke |
unlob is not on this table: we are self-funded and not raising. That is a fact about us, not an argument — it means our pricing has no valuation to grow into, and it means we are smaller than everyone above.
The five kinds of provider
These are usually compared as one market. They are not one market — the failure modes are completely different, and picking across categories by price is how teams end up rebuilding.
Own-index search APIs
These vendors crawl and index the web themselves. Nobody upstream can deprecate them, reprice them or rate-limit them.
Neural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Source: Exa pricing, Exa Labs raises $250M at $2.2B valuation, Announcing our Series B
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.
Source: Parallel pricing, Parallel Web Systems hits $2B valuation
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
Source: Brave Search API pricing
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.
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.
Source: Gemini API pricing
Search and synthesis in one call. You get an answer rather than results, which is convenient until you need to control retrieval yourself.
Source: Perplexity API pricing
Microsoft's designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.
Source: Grounding with Bing Search
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
Source: Bing Search API retirement
The built-in search tool in the Responses API. Zero integration work if you are already on OpenAI, and no control over retrieval whatsoever.
Source: OpenAI pricing
Retrieval layers
These sit on top of other search providers and add cleaning, ranking and citation. Convenient, with someone else’s index underneath.
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
Source: Tavily pricing, Tavily raises $25M, Tavily company profile
A French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.
Source: Linkup, Linkup raises $10M seed
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.
The mature multi-engine SERP API. Returns real Google, Bing and Baidu result pages with all their features — at SERP-scraping prices.
Source: SerpApi pricing
The cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Source: Serper pricing
Industrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Source: DataForSEO pricing
Google's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.
Source: Custom Search JSON API pricing
Crawl & extraction
These turn a URL into clean text. Essential in most stacks, but they need something to hand them the URLs.
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.
Source: Firecrawl pricing, Firecrawl Series A
Prefix any URL and get clean markdown back. The lowest-friction extraction tool there is, and priced per token rather than per page.
Source: Jina Reader
One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.
Source: Diffbot pricing
Proxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
Source: Bright Data pricing
Take the data
This table is published as JSON, with the source URL and read date attached to every figure. Cite it, check it, or use it to build your own comparison — we would rather the numbers were right than exclusive.
/api/landscape.jsonFrequently asked questions
Which web search APIs actually own their index?
Exa, Parallel, Brave, Mojeek, Diffbot and unlob crawl and index the web themselves. Google Custom Search, Gemini grounding, Perplexity and the retired Bing API serve a large first-party index but only on their own terms. SerpAPI, Serper and DataForSEO resell Google or Bing results; Tavily and Linkup add a retrieval layer over other providers; Firecrawl and Jina Reader extract from URLs you already have.
What happened to the Bing Web Search API?
Microsoft retired it on 11 August 2025, taking Web, Image, News, Video, Entity, Autosuggest, Spell Check and Custom Search with it. API creation was silently disabled in March 2025, weeks before the announcement. The official migration path is Grounding with Bing Search inside Azure AI Foundry, which is a platform commitment rather than a drop-in replacement.
Does the Brave Search API still have a free tier?
Not the perpetual one. Brave retired its long-running free developer tier in February 2026 and replaced it with a $5 monthly credit against paid usage. The index itself — 40 billion pages and genuinely independent of Google and Bing — is unchanged.
Is Tavily still independent?
No. Nebius Group agreed to acquire Tavily for $275 million in February 2026, after Tavily had raised $25 million across a seed and a $20 million Series A led by Insight Partners. The API continues to operate as part of Nebius.
How much money has gone into this category?
Roughly $600 million in disclosed funding plus a $275 million exit, in about eighteen months. Exa raised $250 million in May 2026 at a $2.2 billion valuation; Parallel Web Systems raised $230 million across two rounds, reaching $2.0 billion in April 2026; Firecrawl raised a $14.5 million Series A; Linkup raised a $10 million seed.
Which is cheapest per 1,000 queries?
Among providers that publish a flat rate and run their own index, unlob is cheapest at $0.40 per 1,000 on the Scale plan, ahead of Parallel's Turbo tier at $1, Brave at $5 and Exa at $7. DataForSEO is cheaper still at roughly $0.60 to $1, and Serper reaches $0.30 at volume, but both are SERP resellers dependent on Google.
Does any search API expose a knowledge graph over the open web?
Diffbot maintains a Knowledge Graph from its own crawl, and unlob exposes a coverage graph with six traversal tools — related, corroborate, authorities, dossier, path and assemble_context. Beyond those, graph retrieval in this market is generally something you build yourself over your own documents with GraphRAG or Neo4j, rather than something a web search API provides.
The cheapest own-index option on this page
$0.40 per 1,000 queries, a coverage graph nobody else offers, and an answer when you ask why a URL is missing. Start on the free tier and check the claims yourself.