AI Search APIs Overview
Search APIs give LLMs and agents fresh web context. Two shapes exist: raw-results APIs (ranked results or page content you feed to your own model) and answer/grounding APIs (the provider runs retrieval and synthesis, returns text with citations). > [!caution] Pricing snapshot
This note’s subject is search-API pricing, so it keeps list prices: read from vendor pages on 2026-09-30 and partly re-checked 2026-10-02. They change often; confirm on the vendor pricing page.
Prices below are that snapshot.
| Provider | What it offers | List price (2026-09-30) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| exa | Search (several latency tiers), Contents, Answer, Monitors, Agent API | Standard search 4, fast/auto 12-15 per 1K; contents 5 per 1K; Agent API from 1.00 (xhigh) | $10 free credits monthly (up to 2,500 Instant searches), no card; vendor describes neural/semantic search focus |
| tavily | Search, Extract, Crawl, Map, Research | Free 1,000 credits/month; pay-as-you-go $0.008 per credit; Project plan 4,000 credits/month; credits per call vary by endpoint | Site branding says it is operated by Nebius (acquisition terms not verified: see tavily); student offer per vendor page |
| Brave Search API | Search (own index, 40+ billion pages claimed), Answers (grounded summaries) | Search 4 per 1K plus 5 monthly free credit on both plans; card requirement from the 2026-09-30 reading, not re-checked | Vendor describes an independent index and Goggles filtering |
| Perplexity Search API | Ranked web results with snippets, domain/language/country filters | Standard 1 per 1K | See perplexity-search-api; Sonar API is the answer-style sibling |
| Google (via Google Gemini API) | Grounding with Google Search tool inside Gemini calls, with inline citations | Gemini 3.x: 5,000 free search requests/month then 35 per 1K grounded prompts | Not a standalone results API; billed per search query on Gemini 3 |
| Bright Data SERP API | Raw SERP from Google, Bing and others | 499 plan for ~380K (not re-fetched since 2026-09-30) | Scraping infrastructure, see brightdata |
| You.com | Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research, Finance Research APIs | Search 1 per 1K pages; answer 12 per 1K; $100 free credit | See you-com (vendor pricing page, 2026-10-02) |
How to choose
- Need results to feed your own RAG or agent loop: Exa, Tavily, Brave or Perplexity Search; compare latency tiers (Exa instant vs deep, Perplexity fast vs standard).
- Need a cited answer with minimal plumbing: Brave Answers, Perplexity Sonar (token plus $5-14 per 1K request fees), Exa Answer, or Gemini with Google grounding.
- Need raw Google results: SERP scrapers like Bright Data; Google grounding does not hand you a SERP.
- Need full page content after search: Exa contents, Tavily Extract/Crawl.
- Combine with reranking and evaluation, see rag-evaluation and rerankers-and-cross-encoders.
Open items (still unverified)
Latency and quality comparisons between vendors (no independent benchmark consulted; Brave’s “highest agent quality score” and You.com’s SimpleQA/DeepSearchQA figures are vendor claims); Tavily acquisition terms (only the Nebius branding was re-checked); Bright Data row not re-fetched; Google Custom Search/Programmable Search API status.
Sources
- https://exa.ai/docs/reference/getting-started and https://exa.ai/pricing (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://www.tavily.com/pricing and https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-reference/introduction (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://brave.com/search/api/ (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search and https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://brightdata.com/pricing/serp (accessed 2026-09-30)
- https://you.com/pricing and https://you.com/docs/ (accessed 2026-10-02)
- All other vendor pages above re-fetched 2026-10-02 (Exa, Tavily, Brave, Perplexity, Gemini pricing).