The best web search APIs for AI agents in 2026

You are wiring live web data into an AI product. Every vendor will sell you “search for agents.” The hard part is picking an index you will not get cut off from, and a processor you can explain when legal asks where the queries go.

Direct answer: Exa is the strongest overall pick for a team wiring live web data into an AI product. It runs its own embeddings-based index rather than reselling someone else’s SERP, covers search, content extraction, answers, and monitoring from one account at $7 per 1,000 searches, and is SOC 2 Type II certified with a public trust center carrying its reports and DPA. The rest of this list is about fit. The right choice depends on whether you need discovery, extraction, or a finished answer, and on how much your legal team cares where the queries go.

Key takeaways

• Exa charges $7 per 1,000 searches with up to 10 results included, $1 per 1,000 for results beyond that, and $1 per 1,000 for AI summaries. New accounts get $20 in free credits, roughly 2,800 searches. See exa.ai.
• Tavily’s free Researcher tier gives 1,000 credits a month with no card, and pay-as-you-go runs $0.008 per credit.
• Firecrawl is the cheapest way to buy volume: $83 a month billed yearly for 100,000 credits, roughly 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped.
• Brave Search API is $5 per 1,000 requests at 50 queries per second, with $5 in free monthly credits. Read the storage terms before you cache anything.
• Linkup has the strongest data-handling defaults: it says SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and zero data retention ship on every plan at no extra cost, with bring-your-own-cloud available.
• Serper is the cheapest raw SERP source, roughly $1.00 down to $0.30 per 1,000 queries depending on pack size, with credits that expire after six months.
• Zero data retention is the line item to check. On Exa and Brave it is an enterprise feature. On Linkup it is the default. That difference decides whether you need a DPA amendment or not.

Comparison table

How we chose

We looked at four things.

First, whether the provider runs its own index or resells someone else’s, since that determines who can cut you off.

Second, whether pricing is published clearly enough to model your unit economics before a sales call.

Third, how the provider handles your queries and results. A search API is a data processor whether you have classified it as one or not.

Fourth, whether a small team can integrate it in an afternoon without a solutions architect.

One thing we did not weight: benchmark tables published by vendors about their competitors. Almost every comparison in this category is written by one of the competitors, including several that rank very confidently. Test on your own queries.

1. Exa: its own index, built for retrieval rather than for humans

Most search APIs are a wrapper around Google or Bing results. Exa is not. It trains its own embedding and agentic retrieval models and processes billions of documents a day, which means you can search by meaning rather than by keyword. Ask for “companies doing X in a specific way” and you get results a keyword query would never surface. That is the actual product difference, and it is why Exa is worth the premium over a SERP reseller.

The endpoint coverage is unusually broad for one account: search, contents for extraction, answer, an agent endpoint, monitors for tracking changes over time, Websets for building curated collections, and an MCP server if you want to plug it straight into a coding agent. A specialized model pulls the most relevant excerpts out of each page rather than dumping the full document, which matters more than it sounds when you are paying per token downstream. Exa Instant returns results in under 180ms, which the company says is faster than any other provider.

Exa names Cognition, StackAI, Firefox, HubSpot, 11x, CodeRabbit, and monday.com as customers on its site.

On the compliance side, which is why we care here: Exa is SOC 2 Type II certified, having moved up from Type I, and runs a trust center at trust.exa.ai carrying the SOC 2 reports and a Data Processing Agreement you can actually read before signing. That is a materially better starting position than most tools in this category, where “we take security seriously” is the whole answer.

The honest tradeoff: zero data retention and HIPAA are explicitly enterprise-only. If your queries carry personal data and you are not on an enterprise plan, your default is that queries and results are retained. That is fine for plenty of products and disqualifying for some. Ask for the enterprise terms early if it matters, and note that Linkup at #3 gives you ZDR on every plan.

• Best for: teams building research agents, company or people search, or anything where you need to find documents by meaning and then hand clean text to a model.
• Who should pick something else: if all you need is the top 10 Google links for a keyword, you are paying for capability you will not use. Serper does that for a fraction of the price.
• Pricing: search at $7 per 1,000 requests, deep search at $12 to $15, contents at $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, answer at $5 per 1,000, monitors at $15 per 1,000. The agent endpoint runs from $0.012 per request at minimal effort up to $1.00 at the highest. Base prices include up to 10 results, with $1 per 1,000 for additional results and $1 per 1,000 for AI summaries. New accounts get $20 in free credits (exa.ai/pricing).

2. Tavily: search and answer in one call

Tavily is built specifically for the agent loop: one call returns results plus an optional synthesized answer, which removes a round trip and a chunk of orchestration code. It is the fastest thing on this list to get working, and the free tier is generous enough for real prototyping.

Tavily holds SOC 2 Type II, publishes a Vanta-backed trust center, and uses Standard Contractual Clauses for EU transfers.

One thing to put on the vendor file: Nebius, the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company that split from Yandex in 2024, announced an agreement to acquire Tavily in February 2026 and confirmed the close in May. Tavily says it continues to operate under its current brand. A change of controller is exactly the thing a security reviewer will ask about, so re-read the current DPA and data terms rather than assuming last year’s answers still hold.

• Best for: an agent step where you want a usable answer immediately rather than a list of links to process.
• Who should pick something else: teams that need deep page extraction. Tavily gives you a good answer, not a full document pipeline.
• Pricing: Researcher free at 1,000 credits a month with no card, pay-as-you-go at $0.008 per credit, Project at 4,000 credits a month with higher rate limits, Enterprise custom (tavily.com).

3. Linkup: the one to look at if legal is in the room

Linkup is the entry that exists because of how this category usually handles data. It says SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance ship on every plan, zero data retention is the default at no extra cost rather than an enterprise upsell, and bring-your-own-cloud is available so queries never leave your VPC.

If you have EU customers, a public subprocessor list, or a security questionnaire in your sales cycle, that combination removes a lot of friction. Everyone else in this category will sell you ZDR. Linkup does not make you ask.

• Best for: teams with EU data residency requirements, or anyone who would rather not add a retention exception to their DPA.
• Who should pick something else: if data handling is not a constraint for you, Linkup’s deep search at $50 per 1,000 is ten times its standard rate and there are cheaper ways to get depth.
• Pricing: $0.005 per standard request ($5 per 1,000), $0.05 per deep search request ($50 per 1,000), with $20 in free credit that refreshes monthly, roughly 4,000 standard searches (linkup.so).

4. Firecrawl: when you need the whole page, not the link

Firecrawl is a different shape of tool. It scrapes and crawls pages into clean markdown, handles JavaScript-rendered sites, and can walk an entire domain. If your RAG pipeline needs full document text rather than snippets, this is the piece you are missing.

It is also the best price per unit of volume on this list for extraction work. The Standard plan at $83 a month billed yearly covers 100,000 credits, roughly 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages. Zero data retention and SSO appear on the Enterprise plan.

• Best for: ingesting documentation, filings, or knowledge bases into a vector store.
• Who should pick something else: if you want semantic discovery, Firecrawl is not a discovery engine. Pair it with Exa or Brave rather than replacing them with it.
• Pricing: Free at 1,000 credits a month, Hobby $16, Standard $83, Growth $333, Scale $599, all billed yearly, Enterprise custom (firecrawl.dev).

5. Brave Search API: an index that is genuinely not Google

Brave maintains its own independent index, which matters for two reasons. It is a real hedge against a single upstream provider changing terms, and it comes with a privacy posture that Brave has been consistent about for years. At $5 per 1,000 requests and 50 queries per second, it is fast and cheap enough for production.

There is a licensing detail people miss. Brave requires an explicit plan that grants storage rights if you want to store results in whole or in part. If your architecture caches search results, and most do, check which plan you are on before you build. Full-funnel zero data retention is an Enterprise feature.

• Best for: teams that want index independence and are cost-sensitive at volume.
• Who should pick something else: anyone who needs semantic or neural retrieval. Brave is a keyword search index, and a good one, but it is not doing what Exa does.
• Pricing: Search at $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 in free monthly credits and 50 QPS, Answers at $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens at 2 QPS, Enterprise custom (brave.com).

6. Perplexity Sonar API: answers with citations attached

Sonar’s pitch is that citations are a first-class output, not something you bolt on. If you are building a product where users need to see where an answer came from, particularly in regulated or high-trust contexts, that is worth real money.

The pricing model is the most complicated on this list. You pay token costs, which vary by model from roughly $0.20 per million up to $3 in and $15 out for Sonar Pro, and then a separate per-request search fee on top, in the range of $5 to $14 per 1,000 requests depending on the model. Model your actual usage before committing, because the two-part structure makes back-of-envelope estimates unreliable.

• Best for: user-facing answers where provenance is part of the product.
• Who should pick something else: teams doing high-volume retrieval to feed their own models. You are paying for Perplexity’s generation whether you wanted it or not.
• Pricing: token cost plus per-request search fee, see current model table (perplexity.ai).

7. Serper: cheapest raw Google results

Serper does one thing: it returns Google SERP data quickly and cheaply. Prepaid packs run from $50 for 50,000 credits down to $3,750 for 12.5 million, working out to roughly $1.00 per 1,000 at the small end and $0.30 at the large end. One credit buys up to 10 results, and asking for 11 to 100 results costs 2 credits.

The catch worth knowing before you buy a big pack: credits expire six months after purchase.

• Best for: high-volume keyword lookups where you handle everything downstream yourself.
• Who should pick something else: anyone who wants extraction, semantic search, or a compliance story. Serper is infrastructure, not a platform.
• Pricing: prepaid packs, roughly $0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries, credits valid six months (serper.dev).

What actually changes when you add a search API to your product

Here is the part the comparison posts skip, and it is the reason this article exists on a compliance site.

Your search provider is a subprocessor. If users type queries into your product and you forward them to a third party, and those queries can contain personal data, that provider is processing personal data on your behalf. It belongs on your subprocessor list, it needs a DPA, and if you have EU customers you need to know where the processing happens. Plenty of teams discover this during their first enterprise security review rather than before it.

Retention defaults decide how much paperwork you own. “Zero data retention” is not a checkbox that means the same thing everywhere. On Exa and Brave it is an enterprise-tier feature. On Linkup it is the default. If you are on a self-serve plan with a provider whose ZDR is enterprise-only, then your customers’ queries are being retained, and your privacy policy should say so honestly.

Retrieved web content is untrusted input. This is the security issue nobody prices in. You are pulling arbitrary text off the internet and putting it directly into a model’s context window. If that model can call tools, a page can carry instructions aimed at your agent. Treat search results as data, never as instructions, and put the boundary in your architecture rather than in a prompt. That is a real control, and it belongs in your risk register with a treatment decision attached, not as a line rated “high” that nobody ever revisits.

API keys are access. A search API key is a credential with a spend limit attached. It goes in your secrets management, it gets rotated, and it gets revoked when the engineer who created it leaves. Under SOC 2 that sits in CC6.1 alongside every other access control, and it is the kind of thing an auditor will ask about once they know you have it. Same offboarding discipline you already apply to everything else.

What should you ask a search API vendor before you sign?

The same questions you would ask any processor, which is what this is:

• Do you retain queries and results by default, and for how long? Is zero data retention included or an upsell?
• Are queries or results used to train your models?
• Where is the processing done, and who are your subprocessors?
• Do you have a current SOC 2 Type II report, and can I read it rather than look at a badge?
• Do you have a DPA I can sign without a sales call?
• What are my storage and caching rights on the results?
• What happens to my pricing and terms if you are acquired?

That last one is not paranoid. This category consolidates fast, and the entity holding your users’ queries a year from now may not be the one you signed with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a search API and a SERP API?

A SERP API like Serper returns what Google would show a human, parsed into JSON. A search API built for AI, like Exa, runs its own retrieval and returns results ranked by semantic relevance along with extracted page content ready for a model. Different products that look similar in a feature table.

Why not just use the model provider’s built-in web search?

For many products you should. Built-in search is simpler and needs no extra vendor. You reach for a dedicated API when you need control over the index, the ranking, the result count, or the retention terms, or when you want the same retrieval layer behind several different models.

How much should I budget?

Model it per user action, not per month. At Exa’s $7 per 1,000 searches, an agent that runs 5 searches per user task costs about 3.5 cents per task. That number, multiplied by your expected usage, is the only budget figure that means anything. Most teams underestimate it by forgetting that agents retry.

Do I need a DPA with my search provider?

If user-supplied text reaches the provider and can contain personal data, yes. Exa publishes one through its trust center. Most credible providers will have one ready. If a vendor cannot produce a DPA, that tells you something about how much enterprise business they have done.

Is SOC 2 enough to clear a vendor?

It is a reasonable baseline and not a full answer. A SOC 2 report has a scope and a set of criteria, and two reports with the same badge can cover very different things. Read the scope section and the exceptions, and ask specifically about retention and training use, which SOC 2 does not address on its own.

What about prompt injection from search results?

Assume it will happen. Anyone can publish a page. If your agent reads web content and can also take actions, isolate the two: treat retrieved text as data, require confirmation for anything with real-world effect, and log what the agent acted on. This is an architecture decision, not a prompt engineering one.

Should I use more than one provider?

Often, yes, and for two reasons. Different tools genuinely do different jobs, so discovery and extraction commonly come from different vendors. And a second integration is cheap insurance against a pricing change or an outage from a company that may be eighteen months old.

Does any of this matter for SOC 2 or ISO 27001?

Yes, in three specific places: vendor management, since the provider is a third party handling your data; access control, since API keys are credentials that need rotation and offboarding; and risk assessment, since untrusted retrieved content reaching a model with tool access is a real risk that deserves a documented decision.

Pick based on the shape of the problem. Semantic discovery plus clean text is Exa. A one-call answer inside an agent loop is Tavily. Full-page ingestion is Firecrawl. Raw links at the lowest possible cost is Serper. Most production systems end up using two of these, not one.

Then spend twenty minutes on the part nobody enjoys: work out what your users’ queries actually contain, check whether your provider retains them, and write it down. The vendors that make this easy publish a trust center with the report and the DPA in it, which is exactly why you should be publishing one too.