Web search APIs for AI agents
9 APIs compared on price, free tier, MCP support and real usage. Prices from the vendors' pricing pages, checked Oct 9, 2026.
Free to start
8 of 9
Exa, Tavily, Parallel
Official MCP server
8 of 9
plug straight into Claude Code, Cursor and others
| API | Free | Price | SDK downloads / wk | GitHub stars | MCP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exa Neural web search API with page contents, answers and deep-research agent runs for LLMs. |
$10 credits every month plus a $10... | $7 / 1k requests · free tier | 2.4M | 234 | MCP |
| Tavily Web search, extract, crawl and research API that returns LLM-ready results for agents. |
1,000 API credits/month, no credit card | $8 / 1k requests · free tier | 1.9M | 1,423 | MCP |
| Parallel Agent-oriented web search, extract, deep-research task and monitoring APIs with citations. |
$5 in free credits per month (plus up to $80... | $5 / 1k requests · free tier | 1.1M | 28 | MCP |
| Perplexity API (Sonar / Search API) Raw web search results API plus an Agent API that answers with live-web citations. |
— | $5 / 1k requests | 368K | 76 | MCP |
| SerpApi Scrapes Google and other search engines and returns structured JSON results. |
250 searches/month | $25 / 1k requests · free tier | 249K | 176 | MCP |
| Linkup Web search API for AI agents with sourced answers, structured output, fetch and deep research. |
$20 credit at signup (professional email),... | $5 / 1k requests · free tier | 167K | 46 | MCP |
| Jina Search (s.jina.ai) Searches the web and returns the top results converted into LLM-friendly text. |
10M free tokens with a new API key | Free plan | — | 12.1K | MCP |
| Brave Search API Independent-index web search API (plus an Answers endpoint) for grounding agents. |
$5 in free credits every month (credit card... | $5 / 1k requests · free tier | — | 1,491 | MCP |
| Serper Fast, low-cost Google SERP API returning search, news, images, places and more as JSON. |
2,500 free queries, no credit card | $1 / 1k requests · free tier | — | — | MCP (community) |
Other categories
Scraping and crawling Browser automation (cloud) Code sandboxes Memory for agents Vector databases LLM gateways and routers Email sending Voice (speech-to-text Payments for agents Blockchain RPC and node providers DEX swap and liquidity APIs Crypto market and on-chain data 3D model generation Image generation APIs Sound effects and music generation Video generation APIs