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Best Web Search tools
Search + retrieval APIs agents call to read the live web.
Ranked by cost · 100k queries+ verified agent-readiness · not yet benchmarked
Comparable cost for a standard workload — the objective axis. AI rank = price-blind quality opinion aggregated from multiple AI models (labeled, never mixed into the cost order). Click any column to sort. how it's scored →
↓ sorted by cost — cheapest for the standard workload first · click any header to re-sort · # = position in current sort
| # | Tool | 100k queries | AI rank | Free tier | SOC 2 | Docs | Maint. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Serper | ✗ | — | — | — | ||
| 2 |  SearchAPI.io | — | — | — | |||
| 3 |  Firecrawl | 5/5 | active | ||||
| 4 |  Tavily | — | — | ||||
| 5 |  Brave Search API | — | — | ||||
| 6 |  You.com API | 4/5 | — | ||||
| 7 |  Google Custom Search JSON API | — | — | ||||
| 8 |  Linkup | — | — | ||||
| 9 |  Parallel | ✗ | — | — | |||
| 10 |  Exa | 5/5 | active | ||||
| 11 |  Kagi Search API | ✗ | — | — | — | ||
| 12 |  SerpAPI | — | — | ||||
| 13 |  Jina AI | ✗ | — | — | |||
| 14 |  Perplexity Sonar API | ✗ | 4/5 | — |