Introducing the You.com Answer API: Grounded Answers Within Our Web Search API

Today, we're launching the You.com Answer API. In some instances, a workflow may require search results (as we deliver via our Web Search API) in addition to a synthesized answer that responds to the query at hand. Ensuring this synthesized answer is robust enough is challenging, and can require substantial processing to ensure high accuracy, without sacrificing latency. The Answer API completes all of this work quickly and effectively—delivering 93.48% accuracy and a p50 latency of 2.67 seconds on Simple QA at $5 per 1000 calls. 

What is the Answer API?

Along with full web search results, the Answer API delivers a complete synthesized answer backed by verified citations. What sets this product apart is the focus on high-speed factual grounding. Answer API doesn’t simply pass through what an LLM derives from the provided sources, it actively verifies that every citation actually exists in the source text and supports any claims made, without compromising latency. Our Answer API also returns the exact source quotes the LLM used to ground its answer text, ensuring that the answer is accurate and minimizing hallucinations.

This endpoint can be used alongside the broader family of You.com APIs to power everything from one-off queries where a high confident answer is required to output to an end user, to delivering a mid-trajectory summarized response in a multi-step agent workflow. Synthesizing web search results is a task that requires high performance across multiple underlying functions (i.e., chunking, reranking, citation verification), which can now confidently be outsourced to the Answer API—freeing your agentic systems to focus on how to best act on an answer. In instances where token efficiency is meaningful to your workflow and the answer itself is complete, using synthesized answer versus passing the entirety of the search results downstream can drastically decrease token costs. 

The Answer API exists as a ‘Search plus synthesis’ offering, so it accepts the same parameters used by the Web Search API. Similar to the Web Search API, its response includes the most useful of the Web Search API response components, to ensure compatibility and interpretability in using both of these endpoints. Full parity with the Web Search API response will be released in the coming weeks. 

Where the Answer API Fits

You.com now offers five distinct endpoints, each optimized for a specific workflow and query type:

• Web Search API: Real-time web results. Best for raw retrieval or when you prefer to handle synthesis downstream.
• Contents API: Clean, extracted text from specific URLs. Ideal for when you already have the target url and just need the content.
• Answer API: A synthesized, cited answer alongside web search results. Perfect for delivering a direct answer to questions without building your own synthesis layer.
• Research API: Deep, multi-step investigation. The right choice when comprehensive analysis matters more than ultra-low latency.
• Finance Research API: deep research tailored specifically for complex financial workflows.

The Answer API is designed for straightforward questions that require minimal searching. If a query demands multi-step searches or cross-source reasoning, our Research API is still the best tool for the job. But when a question can be answered from a single, high-quality search, the Answer API provides a faster, cheaper, and more lightweight alternative.

The Response

This is an example of a typical response from the Answer API that shows the citation structure and how both excerpts and results are included.

This example answers the question "What causes the aurora borealis?"

{
  "answer": "The aurora borealis is caused by charged particles ejected from the Sun—carried by the solar wind and often intensified by solar flares or coronal mass ejections—that travel to Earth, are funneled by Earth's magnetic field toward the polar regions, and collide with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere. These collisions excite the atoms, which then release photons of light, creating the visible northern lights. [[1, 2, 3]]",
  "citations": [
    {
      "source": "https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/SCIENCE/aurora.html",
      "excerpts": [
        "Auroras are brilliant ribbons of light weaving across Earth's northern or southern polar regions. These natural light shows are caused by magnetic storms that have been triggered by solar activity, such as solar flares (explosions on the Sun) or coronal mass ejections (ejected gas bubbles). Energetic charged particles from these events are carried from the Sun by the solar wind.",
        "When these particles seep through Earth's magnetosphere, they cause substorms. Then fast moving particles slam into our thin, high atmosphere, colliding with Earth's oxygen and nitrogen particles. As these air particles shed the energy they picked up from the collision, each atom starts to glow in a different color."
      ]
    },
    {
      "source": "https://www.valofinland.com/what-causes-the-colours-in-aurora-borealis/",
      "excerpts": [
        "The Aurora Borealis is a result of interactions between solar wind and the Earth's atmosphere. Solar wind is a stream of charged particles released from the sun's upper atmosphere, known as the corona. When these particles reach Earth, they collide with gases in our atmosphere, such as oxygen and nitrogen. These collisions excite the gas particles, causing them to emit light."
      ]
    },
    {
      "source": "https://triplefatgoose.com/blogs/down-time/understanding-the-aurora-borealis",
      "excerpts": [
        "When electrons fly through space, two things can happen: they are reflected away by the Earth's magnetic field, or they follow it to the poles. Because the magnetic field is weaker at the poles, the electrons are able to freely enter the atmosphere without being reflected away."
      ]
    }
  ],
  "results": {
    "web": [
      {
        "url": "https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/nmp/st5/SCIENCE/aurora.html",
        "title": "How Auroras Form",
        "snippets": [
          "Auroras are brilliant ribbons of light weaving across Earth's northern or southern polar regions. These natural light shows are caused by magnetic storms that have been triggered by solar activity."
        ]
      },
      {
        "url": "https://auroraqueenresort.fi/what-causes-the-northern-lights-to-appear/",
        "title": "What causes the northern lights to appear? - Aurora Queen Resort",
        "snippets": [
          "The northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, are a mesmerising natural light display that occurs when charged particles from the sun collide with gases in Earth's atmosphere."
        ]
      },
      {
        "url": "https://triplefatgoose.com/blogs/down-time/understanding-the-aurora-borealis",
        "title": "The Aurora Borealis",
        "snippets": [
          "When millions of photons of light are emitted at the same time, it causes the sky to light up and creates the Aurora Borealis."
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Try It

The Answer API is live today. Existing users can call the endpoint right now with their current You.com API keys. If you don't have an account yet, sign up for free to start building!

Read the Answer Docs