And the more uncomfortable half of the argument: owning an index used to be the whole pitch, and in 2026 it is table stakes.
Microsoft disabled new Bing Search API keys in March 2025 and retired the service on 11 August, taking Web, Image, News, Video, Entity, Autosuggest, Spell Check and Custom Search with it. Every product built on it had to be rewritten, however good the results had been.
Brave retired its long-standing free developer tier in February 2026, replacing it with a $5 monthly credit. That is a legitimate business decision — and if your onboarding funnel depended on it, it was also your problem overnight.
A reseller's throughput is whatever its upstream allows, shared across every one of its customers. When you scale, you are negotiating for a slice of a quota that belongs to someone else entirely.
In 2024, "we run our own index" was a complete argument. It is not one now. Exa raised $250 million in May 2026 at a $2.2 billion valuation; Parallel Web Systems reached $2.0 billion in April. Both crawl and index the web themselves. Brave has been doing it across 40 billion pages for years.
So owning an index is now the entry requirement rather than the edge. If a vendor's pitch stops there, it is a 2024 pitch. Three things still separate providers:
The own-index providers charge $1 to $7 per 1,000. We charge $0.40, and publish the cost structure that allows it.
Pricing →Every provider ranks documents. None of them let an agent follow the relationships between documents across the open web. We do — six tools.
Coverage graph →Ask any other index why a URL is absent and you get an empty result set. Ask ours and you get a reason.
Coverage transparency →| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 queries | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
$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 |
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 |
$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 |
Exa, Parallel, Brave, Mojeek, Diffbot and unlob crawl and index the web themselves. Google Custom Search, Gemini grounding and Perplexity serve a first-party index on their own terms. SerpAPI, Serper and DataForSEO resell Google or Bing results, and Tavily and Linkup add a retrieval layer on top of other providers.
Because the results are only the same until they are not. When Microsoft retired the Bing Web Search API in August 2025, every product built on it had to be rewritten regardless of how good the results had been. A reseller cannot promise you continuity it does not have.
Yes — when you specifically need Google's ranking. SEO tooling, rank tracking and any workload where the product is literally "what does Google show" should use a SERP API. The mistake is using one for agent retrieval, where you want good sources rather than Google's ordering of them.
Not on its own, not any more. In 2024 it was the whole argument. By 2026, Exa and Parallel each run their own index with roughly $2 billion valuations behind them. What still differentiates is what you pay per query, whether the API can traverse relationships rather than just rank documents, and whether it will tell you what it excluded.
Smaller than Google, smaller than the well-funded competitors, and bounded deliberately rather than accidentally — we admit a curated core and fill the tail on demand. The honest framing is that we optimise for precision of inclusion rather than raw size, and that why_not will tell you exactly what is not there.
Start free and see whether the coverage holds up for your workload. If it does not, why_not will tell you exactly where.