Ground your AI in the live webWeb Search API

A web search API lets software query the live web programmatically and get structured results back as JSON, including titles, URLs, snippets, and metadata. The alternative is scraping HTML search pages, which is fragile. Developers use web search APIs to power search features, research tools, and monitoring. For AI teams, a web search API is the retrieval layer that grounds LLMs and AI agents in real-time information, which reduces hallucinations and keeps answers current beyond a model's training cutoff.

The best web search API for AI agents returns fresh, structured results that are ready for an LLM, runs on an independent index, and gives you control over sources and recency. The You.com Web Search API is built for this. It combines web and news results in one call, can extract full-page content as Markdown, and lets you filter domains and freshness per request. It also connects to agents directly through MCP. You can check its quality yourself with the open-source eval harness.

Yes. It is the same product, with the same endpoint (/v1/search) and the same you.search method in the SDKs. We call it the Web Search API because that's what it does: it searches the open web and live news in real time and returns structured results your application or agent can use directly.

Each call returns unified web search and news results as structured JSON. Every result includes the URL, title, description, snippets, publication age, thumbnail, and favicon. When you enable content extraction, results also include query-relevant highlights or full page content in clean Markdown or HTML. That output drops straight into a RAG pipeline or LLM context window, so you don't need a separate scraper or web crawler API.

Yes. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLM grounding are the core use cases. The API returns live web results with snippets or full-page Markdown, so your model answers from current, citable sources instead of stale training data. Domain filters and freshness controls let you ground responses in the sources you trust, and every result carries a URL for citations.

Yes. You.com operates its own web crawler, web index, and news index. Results are not resold from Google, Bing, or any other third-party search engine. Nothing upstream can deprecate, rate-limit, or reprice your integration, which matters for a production search API that your product depends on.

Yes. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs in August 2025, and many teams that built on Bing, or on resellers of Bing results, needed a replacement. The You.com Web Search API is a drop-in alternative for web and news search. It runs on an independent index and returns structured JSON with snippets, metadata, and optional full-page content. New accounts can start migrating with $100 in free credits.

A SERP API scrapes and parses another search engine's results page, usually Google's, so you depend on that engine's layout, terms, and pricing. A web search API like You.com's queries its own index and returns structured data by design. That approach is more stable and has no scraping risk. It also adds features SERP scrapers can't offer, such as full-page content extraction and per-request domain controls.

Results are real time. The index is continuously recrawled, and a dedicated news index covers breaking stories. You control recency on each request with the freshness parameter: day, week, month, year, or an exact date range such as 2026-01-01to2026-03-31. Every result includes page_age, so your agent can judge how current a source is.

Yes. include_domains restricts results to an allowlist, exclude_domains removes domains you don't want, and boost_domains ranks preferred sources higher. Each supports up to 500 domains. You can combine them with freshness, country, language, and content depth on every request to build a custom search engine for your agent without maintaining an index. Enterprise customers can also discuss vertical and custom indexes.

Point any MCP-enabled client at api.you.com/mcp. That includes Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and agent frameworks that support the Model Context Protocol. The free profile (api.you.com/mcp?profile=free) gives you 100 web searches a day with no signup or API key. For higher volume, add your API key to use your account credits.

There are two. New accounts get $100 in free credits, roughly 20,000 web searches, with no credit card required. Any MCP-enabled tool can also use the free endpoint at api.you.com/mcp?profile=free for 100 queries a day with no signup. You can prototype, run evals, and ship a proof of concept before paying anything.

The Web Search API costs $5.00 per 1,000 calls. Each call returns up to 100 results, and news results are included. Full page content extraction costs $1.00 per 1,000 pages. Pricing is pay as you go with no minimums or commitments, and volume discounts and annual pricing are available for high-throughput applications.

We benchmark in the open. The You.com Web Search Eval Harness is open source and runs SimpleQA, FRAMES, BrowseComp, and DeepSearchQA, with fixed third-party models doing the grading. Current results are published on GitHub. Your free credits cover running the harness on your own queries, so you can compare search API accuracy for your use case instead of relying on vendor claims.

No. Queries and results are never used for model training. Zero Data Retention (ZDR) automatically purges request and response content. The platform is SOC 2 certified and DPA-ready, which meets the security and compliance requirements enterprise AI teams need from a search API provider.