Category · Web, data & documents
Web search APIs for AI agents
Search engines, SERP APIs and research endpoints that give agents fresh knowledge of the web, plus the MCP servers that wrap them. Compared on price per 1,000 queries, freshness, whether results come back as snippets, full text or a written answer, and what the terms let you keep.
Capability keys web.search · web.fetch · search.serp · search.answer · search.research · All tools
letme.dev/web.search picks the top-graded tool in this list and says how to call it direct; calling through letme comes later.
The same listing from the live API. Graded results come first, then the official MCP registry when no graded-only filter is set.
https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/searchFilters
| Compare | # | Tool | Category | Grade | Score | Agent rating | p95 | Context | Price / x402 | Auth | Where | Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | Tavily API + MCPTavily · MCP server | Search | BB | 77.2 | 3.6 (8) | n/a | n/a | $7.50 / 1k req | OAuth or key | Hosted + local | ||
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Tavily's REST API for web search, URL extraction, site mapping, crawling and cited research reports, with the official MCP server hosted at mcp.tavily.com or run locally from npm. Top strength Keyless search and extract, plus a free 1,000 credits a month with no card Top weakness x402 covers advanced search only, not extract, map, crawl or research |
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| 24 | You.com APIsYou.com · HTTP API | Search | BB | 76.9 | 3.8 (8) | n/a | n/a | $5 / 1k req | OAuth or key | Hosted + local | ||
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Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research and Finance Research APIs, plus a hosted MCP server with six tools. Top strength x402 and MPP on Web Search and Finance Research, with no account needed Top weakness Two API hosts. Answer and Research return 'Missing Authentication Token' on ydc-index.io |
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| 51 | Parallel Search and Task APIsParallel Web Systems · HTTP API | Search | BB | 74.1 | 3.6 (8) | n/a | n/a | $1 / 1k req | OAuth or key | Hosted | ||
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Parallel's web APIs for agents. Top strength Fast-mode search at $1 per 1,000 with 10 excerpted results, and Extract at $1 per 1,000 URLs Top weakness Search defaults to advanced mode at $5 per 1,000 when |
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| 116 | LinkupLinkup · HTTP API | Search | B | 69.1 | 4.0 (2) | n/a | n/a | $0.01 / call x402 | OAuth or key | Hosted + local | ||
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Web search API for agents with four depths (flash, fast, standard, deep) and three output types (ranked sources, a cited answer, or JSON matching your schema). Top strength Per-call prices from $0.005, and no credit taken for errors, missing parameters or empty results Top weakness 429 covers both exhausted credit and rate limiting, with no |
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| 132 | Brave Search API + MCPBrave · HTTP API | Search | B | 68.1 | 3.5 (2) | n/a | n/a | $5 / 1k req | OAuth or key | Hosted + local | ||
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REST API over Brave's independent index with web, news, image, video and local search, an LLM Context endpoint with pre-extracted page content and an Answers endpoint with citations. Top strength x402 proxy sells web, LLM Context, news, video, image and local search at $0.005 a call, and a failed search isn't charged Top weakness The status page marks the Search API "not monitored" and shows no incident history |
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| 163 | Exa API + MCPExa · MCP server | Search | B | 66.1 | 4.5 (2) | n/a | n/a | $0.007 / call x402 | OAuth or key | Hosted + local | ||
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Exa's REST API over its own web index, with the official MCP server in front of it. Top strength x402 on /search and /contents in USDC on Base or Solana, so an agent can pay per call with no account Top weakness The hosted MCP leaked API keys to a third-party analytics endpoint from November 2025 to 15 April 2026, per Exa's own commits |
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| 179 | ValyuValyu · HTTP API | Search | B | 64.6 | 4.5 (2) | n/a | n/a | $1.50 / 1k pages | OAuth or key | Hosted | ||
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Search API that covers the web plus specialised sources (arXiv, PubMed, SEC filings, market data, patents, clinical trials, genomics). Top strength Web plus academic, financial, patent and life-science sources behind one search call Top weakness No published rate limits and no Retry-After or backoff guidance |
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| 216 | SerpApiSerpApi · HTTP API | Search | B | 62.6 | 3.5 (2) | n/a | n/a | $25 / 1k req | API key | Hosted + local | ||
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Scrapes live results pages from Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Amazon, YouTube and about 20 other engines and returns them as parsed JSON or markdown. Top strength Over 100 engines behind one GET URL, with Top weakness 25 incidents on the status feed from July to 1 October 2026, including an outage across all APIs on 10 September |
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| 290 | Fetch (MCP reference server)MCP project (reference servers) · MCP server | Search | C | 57.6 | 4.0 (2) | n/a | n/a | Free · OSS | None | Local | ||
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Python reference server with a single 'fetch' tool that retrieves a URL and converts HTML to markdown, with pagination (start_index/max_length) and raw mode. Top strength One tool of about 300 tokens, with Top weakness Reaches private and loopback addresses and follows redirects, with no allow list |
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| 351 | SearchAPI.ioSearchApi · HTTP API | Search | D | 51.4 | 3.0 (2) | n/a | n/a | $4 / 1k req | OAuth or key | Hosted | ||
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SERP scraping API returning parsed JSON from Google and its verticals, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, YouTube, Amazon, TikTok, ad libraries and travel sites, over 150 engine endpoints behind one GET URL. Top strength 99.9% SLA on every plan and no incidents on the status page since August Top weakness MCP exposes over 100 tools with no toolsets |
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| 446 | SerperSerper · HTTP API | Search | F | 24.3 | 2.5 (2) | n/a | n/a | $1 / 1k req | API key | Hosted | ||
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API for retrieving Google search results. Top strength $0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries on prepaid packs, with no subscription Top weakness No status page, SLA or incident history |
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Nothing matches these filters. .
p95 latency and context cost come from our probes, which haven't run yet, so those columns start hidden. Grades run from AA to F, and agent-ready means BB or better. Filters, sorting and export run in your browser; the table is complete without JavaScript.
Indexed, not reviewed (12)
Listings sorted into this category from public catalogues (the official MCP registry, APIs.guru, the x402 Bazaar and OpenRouter), with facts and our own checks but no score, grade or rank. How the index works.
| Listing | Kind | What it does | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoAnyAPI MCP goanyapi.com | MCP server | GoAnyAPI SEO MCP: traffic, DR, backlinks, keywords, Google/Bing SERP/autocomplete, Ads Transparency. | vendor's own |
| MotiBlog motiblog.ai | MCP server | Agent-first SEO research and publishing: competitors, SERPs, internal links, and Search Console. | vendor's own |
| Nimrod orchis.ai | MCP server | Web search with quality scores; web pages are read on your computer by the local server. | vendor's own |
| Perplexity API Platform perplexity.ai | MCP server | Real-time web search, reasoning, and research through Perplexity's API | vendor's own, widely used |
| SERP Agent SEO serp-agent.com | MCP server | Full-cycle SEO automation for AI agents: technical audits, SEO articles, machine-readable pricing. | vendor's own |
| SERPdive Web Search serpdive.com | MCP server | AI-agent web search, answer-ready content. Beats Tavily: 60.7% of quality duels, 20.2% fewer tokens. | vendor's own |
| serpjet-mcp serpjet.io | MCP server | Google SERP API for AI agents. 10 result types incl. shopping. 1,000 free searches/month. | vendor's own |
| siGit sigit.si | MCP server | MCP server for siGit (sigit.si): browse repos, search code, manage PRs/issues, web search. | vendor's own |
| Social Media Search API — Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok (XPOZ) xpoz.ai | MCP server | Twitter/X, Instagram, Reddit & TikTok data for AI agents. Billions of posts. No API keys. | vendor's own |
| Trawlia trawlia.co | MCP server | Web search and page extraction for agents, returned as readable text rather than raw JSON. | vendor's own |
| web-search groundroute.ai | MCP server | Web search for AI agents — one tool across 6 engines, routed to the cheapest + cached. | vendor's own |
| web-search keenable.ai | MCP server | Live web search and clean-markdown page fetch over the Keenable web index. | vendor's own |
How the ranking works
Every listing is scored 0 to 100 and given a grade from AA to F. In the October 2026 research run, 7 of the 9 weighted categories are scored from public evidence (status history, docs, pricing, terms, source and security pages) against a published checklist, with the reason and sources for every score on the listing. Performance and Task success wait for our probes and task suites, so their weight is shared across the rest until they run. Negative events deduct up to 15 points. Read the methodology.
For companies
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