[Last updated: 7th May 2026]
This is a comparison of web search APIs for AI agents.
Why Use a Search API With an AI Agent or Workflow?
You may want a web search API if you’re building or using an AI agent or workflow that will benefit from retrieving relevant web content to include in its context.
For example, if you’re creating a fact checking tool, you might want to search the web and retrieve content relating to a fact that your system is checking.
The Two Main Types of Web Search APIs
There are two main types of web search APIs that you may like to use with an AI agent or workflow.
Type 1: SERP APIs
These are wrappers around the (human-first) web interfaces provided by traditional web search engines (often Google). They work by scraping the pages returned by the search engine.
This has a few implications:
- The quality of their results matches that of the underlying search index (e.g. Google’s.)
- They can be very cheap (as they’re not having to maintain their own search index.)
- They only return a small snippet of content for each search result (in practice this means your system is more likely to need to follow up by fetching the full contents of the corresponding URL.)
- They tend to be higher latency.
Behind the scenes, Google doesn’t like people piggybacking on their services in this way and have been both contesting the legality of such practices and putting more and more technical hurdles in place. For now, at least, the providers continue to operate.
Type 2: AI-Focused Web Search APIs
The rise of LLMs and AI agents has led to a range of providers offering a new style of web search API aimed specifically at AI use cases.
Examples include Exa, Parallel, Tavily, You and Perplexity.
These tend to operate their own web search indexes and have APIs that return much larger amounts of context from the underlying pages.
They often have two flavours of API: one that returns search results; another that goes a step further and returns ‘answers’ based on those results.
How Do AI Agents Use Web Search APIs?
Under the hood, AI agents make use of web search APIs through functionality baked into LLMs known as ‘tool-calling’, ‘tool-use’ or ‘function-calling’.
Off-the-shelf AI agents such as OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Hermes Agent and others have built-in integrations with their own in-house web search APIs or let you select a 3rd party web search provider to use.
Alternatively, assuming your AI agent supports MCP, you can very likely connect it to your chosen web search provider’s MCP server.
If you’re coding up your own agent then you may like to bypass MCP and give your agent a tool that makes calls directly to the provider’s API. Your agent SDK / framework may provide one out of the box (e.g. see LangChain’s search tool integrations.)
Web Search API Pricing
** Firecrawl pricing is per result rather than per call. Each call can have multiple results.
What to Consider When Choosing a Web Search API
1. Underlying Search Index
Different services use different search indexes to retrieve their results.
Many services are wrappers around Google Search and should therefore return very similar results to each other. (These list ‘Google’ in the ‘Search Index’ column of the table above.)
Other services have their own indexes and may return very different sets of results.
Just as you may prefer Google over Bing search when you’re searching manually, you may prefer the results from one web search API over those from another.
2. Amount of Content for Each Search Result
Different services return different amounts of information for each search result. This can have a big impact on the effectiveness of your RAG workflow or agent.
In some cases you may prefer a service that returns relatively long snippets of content even if it costs more per request. In others you may find that smaller snippets of content are fine or even preferable as the LLM’s prompt ends up being more focussed.
3. Pricing
Prices vary considerably between services.
When you’re comparing prices, be aware that some services have optional parameters that, if you need them, can significantly impact pricing, e.g. doubling the cost of requests.
4. Latency
Services differ widely in how quickly they respond to requests.
Low cost services that work by scraping Google (these will list ‘Google’ in the ‘Search Index’ column) may be much slower than services that query their own indexes. These ‘Google wrapper’ services sometimes offer a choice of more expensive, faster options and cheaper, slower options.
5. Rate Limits
All services are limited, to some extent, in the rate of requests they can handle. Some have fixed rate limits that they make public.
6. Other Terms and Conditions
Depending on the nature of your business, factors such as a provider’s privacy policies and/or the country where they operate their servers may be very important.
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