Web Search APIs
Every web search apis we track, compared.
TL;DR: Top pick: Firecrawl. 12 APIs compared, 5 with a free tier; cheapest published entry $0.001 API call (Linkup). Why →
What is a Web Search API?
A Web Search API lets developers integrate web search apis capabilities over HTTP. The Web Search APIs below are compared on pricing, compliance, capabilities, and developer experience from structured, cited data.
| # | API | Pricing | Free | Self-serve | SOC 2 | HIPAA | GDPR | Webhooks | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Firecrawl | Subscription | ✓ | ✓ | Type II | · | ✓ | ✓ | 10 |
| 2 | Exa | Usage | ✓ | ✓ | Type II | ✓ | · | ✓ | 13 |
| 3 | Brave Search API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | Type II | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 12 |
| 4 | Tavily Search API | Hybrid | ✓ | ✓ | Type II | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 7 |
| 5 | Linkup | Usage | ✓ | ✓ | Type II | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 5 |
| 6 | Jina AI Search Foundation (DeepSearch / Reader) | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | · | · | ✓ | ✗ | 17 |
| 7 | Parallel Search API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | Type II | · | · | ✓ | 8 |
| 8 | You.com Search API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | Type II | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 9 |
| 9 | Kagi Search API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | - | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 10 |
| 10 | Perplexity Sonar API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | Type II | ✗ | · | ✗ | 9 |
| 11 | Mojeek Web Search API | Usage | ✗ | ✓ | · | · | ✓ | ✗ | 9 |
| 12 | Google Programmable Search Engine (Custom Search JSON API) | Usage | ✓ | ✗ | · | · | · | ✗ | 3 |
The APIs
#1 Firecrawl
78 / 100Firecrawl is a REST API to search, scrape, and crawl the web at scale, built for AI agents, RAG pipelines, deep research, and lead enrichment, turning sites into LLM-ready data. It uses API-key auth, webhooks, six SDKs, and an official MCP server. Pricing is published and self-serve: 1,000 credits/month free, with subscriptions from $16/month. It carries SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, and a published SLA. Used by Shopify, Canva, and Zapier.
PricingSubscription · from $16 month · free tier ✓TrustSOC 2 Type II · GDPRUsed byShopify, Lovable, Canva, Zapier#2 Exa
74 / 100Exa is a REST API for web search, content crawling, and research agents, designed specifically as a grounding and retrieval layer for LLM applications and AI agents. It offers neural search, full-page content extraction, news and research paper search, scheduled monitors, and an answer-with-citations endpoint, with SDKs for Python, JavaScript, and an MCP server. Pricing is usage-based at $1.00 per 1,000 requests, with a free tier of 20,000 requests per month and self-serve signup; an enterprise plan is available. The service holds SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA certifications, and customers include Cursor, Notion AI, HubSpot, and Databricks.
PricingUsage · from $1 1,000 requests · free tier ✓TrustSOC 2 Type II · HIPAADoesUsed byCursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter#3 Brave Search API
59 / 100Brave Search API gives developers access to Brave's independent web index of over 30 billion pages for building AI products, RAG pipelines, chatbots, and search engines, with endpoints covering web, news, image, video, local place search, answers, and LLM context. Pricing is usage-based at $4 per 1,000 requests, with a free tier of roughly $5 in monthly credits, self-serve signup, and an enterprise plan available. The API is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant, ships with an MCP server, and counts Cohere, Mistral AI, AWS, Shopify, and Snowflake among its documented customers. Usage terms prohibit storing results or using them to train AI models, and attribution is required in customer applications.
PricingUsage · from $4 1,000 requests · free tier ✗TrustSOC 2 Type II · GDPRDoesUsed byApollo, AWS, Axel Springer, CheggThe catchAn independent index rather than a Google/Bing reseller, at a low per-query price, but results may not be stored, cached, or used to build a database.#4 Tavily Search API
83 / 100Tavily Search API is a REST API built for AI applications that need real-time web access, offering search, content extraction, crawling, site mapping, and async deep-research tasks in a single service. It targets RAG pipelines, LLM grounding, and AI agents across 195+ countries, with SDKs for Python and JavaScript/TypeScript and an MCP server available. Pricing starts at $0.008 per credit with 1,000 free credits per month, self-serve signup, and an enterprise plan. The service is SOC 2 Type II certified and GDPR compliant, and its customer list includes AWS, IBM, Mastercard, MongoDB, and LangChain.
PricingHybrid · from $0.008 credit · free tier ✓TrustSOC 2 Type II · GDPRDoesUsed byLangChain, MongoDB, Groq, Writer#5 Linkup
73 / 100Linkup is a production-grade web search API designed for AI applications, covering use cases from RAG and LLM grounding to deep research, legal AI, and sales enrichment. Pricing is usage-based starting at $0.001 per API call, with a $20 monthly free credit and self-serve signup, and an enterprise plan is available for higher rate limits and SLA coverage. The API ships SDKs for Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and an MCP Server, with EU and US data residency options, SOC 2 Type 2 certification, and GDPR compliance. Notable customers include McKinsey, EY, Cohere, and GitGuardian.
PricingUsage · from $0.001 API call · free tier ✓TrustSOC 2 Type II · GDPRDoesUsed byMcKinsey & Company, Cohere, LEGORA, SNCF#6 Jina AI Search Foundation (DeepSearch / Reader)
58 / 100Jina AI Search Foundation is a suite of LLM-oriented search and retrieval APIs covering URL-to-Markdown conversion, web search, iterative deep research, fact-checking, multilingual embeddings, reranking, and text segmentation, aimed at developers building RAG pipelines, AI agents, and answer engines. Pricing is usage-based at $0.05 per million tokens, with a 10 million token free tier shared across all APIs and no sales call required to get started. EU-dedicated endpoints are available for data-residency needs, the platform is GDPR-compliant, and a remote MCP server is supported alongside JavaScript and Node.js SDKs. API inputs and outputs are not used to train Jina's models.
PricingUsage · from $0.05 1,000,000 tokens · free tier ✗TrustGDPRDoesUsed bySingapore Airlines, Salesforce, Alibaba, AWSAvoid ifYou want to try it free before paying#7 Parallel Search API
61 / 100Parallel Search API is a REST-based web search and extraction service built for AI workloads, covering RAG grounding, agent pipelines, deep research, entity discovery, and web monitoring. Pricing is usage-based at $4.00 per 1,000 requests, with a free tier of 20,000 requests and an enterprise plan available; signup is self-serve. The API ships SDKs for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and LangChain, and offers an MCP server alongside webhooks. It holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification and contractually commits to not training on customer data, with zero data retention available under enterprise agreements.
PricingUsage · from $4 1,000 requests · free tier ✗TrustSOC 2 Type IIDoesUsed byClay, Sourcegraph, Harvey, NotionAvoid ifYou want to try it free before paying#8 You.com Search API
72 / 100You.com Search API provides real-time web search, news retrieval, and AI-grounded research capabilities designed for RAG pipelines, LLM agents, and agentic applications. Pricing starts at $5 per 1,000 searches on a usage-based model, with $100 in complimentary credits on signup and a free unauthenticated tier of 100 queries per day. The REST API supports Python and TypeScript SDKs, an MCP server, and both API key and OAuth2 authentication, and is SOC 2 Type 2 certified with GDPR compliance. Customers include Amazon, Databricks, DuckDuckGo, Bank of America, Harvey, and Windsurf.
PricingUsage · from $5 1,000 searches · free tier ✗TrustSOC 2 Type II · GDPRDoesUsed byDuckDuckGo, Harvey, Windsurf, DatabricksAvoid ifYou want to try it free before paying#9 Kagi Search API
53 / 100Kagi Search API provides programmable access to Kagi's premium search index, covering web, image, news, video, podcast, and content extraction endpoints, with built-in summarization and citation-grounded answers suited for RAG pipelines and AI agents. Pricing is usage-based at $12 per 1,000 searches with no sales call required, and an enterprise plan is available. The API is GDPR compliant, supports Python, Go, Rust, and TypeScript SDKs, and ships an MCP server for agent tooling integrations.
PricingUsage · from $12 1,000 searches · free tier ✗TrustGDPRDoesAvoid ifYou want to try it free before paying#10 Perplexity Sonar API
73 / 100Perplexity Sonar API is a REST-based search and language model service that lets developers add real-time web retrieval, Q&A with inline citations, deep research, and semantic embeddings to their products. Pricing is usage-based starting at $1.00 per million tokens, with self-serve signup and no sales call required. The API ships SDKs for Python, TypeScript, and Node.js MCP, holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification, enforces a zero data-retention policy, and counts Samsung among its documented customers.
PricingUsage · from $1 1M tokens · free tier ✗TrustSOC 2 Type IIDoesUsed bySamsungThe catchAn LLM answer engine priced per token, not a raw results API; ideal for cited answers, the wrong tool if you need ranked links to rank-track or scrape.#11 Mojeek Web Search API
39 / 100Mojeek Web Search API provides programmatic access to an independent web index of over 9 billion pages, built for embedding search into applications, grounding LLMs and RAG pipelines, and powering AI agents. Pricing is usage-based per 1,000 queries with self-serve signup, tiered plans covering up to 400,000 queries per day, and custom enterprise arrangements. Mojeek is GDPR-compliant and has been used by Kagi and Meta's BlenderBot 3, giving it a track record in both commercial search products and large-scale AI research.
PricingUsage · free tier ✗TrustGDPRDoesUsed byKagi, SeeKeR (Meta/Facebook BlenderBot 3)Avoid ifYou want to try it free before payingGoogle Programmable Search Engine (Custom Search JSON API) lets developers embed Google web and image search results into applications via a REST API authenticated with an API key, with SDKs available for seven languages including Python, Java, and Go. Pricing starts at $5 per 1,000 queries, with a free tier of 100 queries per day and a hard ceiling of 10,000 paid queries per day. The API is closed to new customers, and existing users must migrate to an alternative solution by January 1, 2027.
PricingUsage · from $5 1,000 queries · free tier ✓The catchClosed to new customers (existing users must migrate by January 1, 2027); listed for reference, not a buildable option today.