← All rankingsMerit-only ranking · 11 providers · one corpus
Best Search API for AI Agents
Eleven web-search APIs benchmarked for agent grounding and RAG — recall, latency and cost per useful result, on the same query set.
Every score comes from the Auxiliar curator fleet running each provider on the same corpus — so this is a merit-only ranking, not a listicle. Jina takes the top spot (recall@10 0.60, $0.00033 / useful result). Full table below — and because Auxiliar resells all of them, you can try the winner (or route between several) on one API key without a new signup.
The ranking
Ranked by composite score. Each row links to the provider's full scorecard.
1
Jn
JinaTop pick
You want clean LLM-ready markdown from a URL or a search-plus-read in a single call.
7.69/10
Recall@10 0.60
$0.00033 / useful result
2
Yo
You.com
You want an independent index with soft domain-boosting and a cited Research API.
7.41/10
Recall@10 0.65
$0.0077 / useful result
3
Se
Serper
You want the cheapest, fastest Google grounding and will synthesize results yourself.
7.24/10
Recall@10 0.57
$0.00053 / useful result
4
Br
Brave Search
You want an index that isn't a Google/Bing scrape, plus a privacy posture and AI grounding.
6.99/10
Recall@10 0.64
$0.0078 / useful result
5
Pl
Parallel
You want the lowest-friction in-loop option — a no-key Search MCP and sub-second P50.
6.76/10
Recall@10 0.64
$0.0062 / useful result
6
Ex
Exa
You want semantic discovery, 'find similar', research, or a built-in /answer endpoint.
6.7/10
Recall@10 0.61
$0.014 / useful result
7
Tv
Tavily
You want the agent/RAG default that returns a relevance score and optional answer in one call.
6.66/10
Recall@10 0.58
$0.014 / useful result
8
Sa
SearchAPI.io
You want SerpApi-compatible JSON at a lower price, with pay-per-success billing.
6.44/10
Recall@10 0.57
$0.007 / useful result
9
Sp
SerpApi
You're compliance-sensitive, need multi-engine breadth, or want the drop-in LangChain default.
6.1/10
Recall@10 0.59
$0.015 / useful result
10
Df
DataForSEO
You need bulk async SERP scraping, webhooks, and the deepest SERP-feature taxonomy.
5.86/10
Recall@10 0.59
$0.0034 / useful result
11
Lk
Linkup
You want a compliant SERP alternative with a built-in sourced answer and structured JSON.
5.47/10
Recall@10 0.39
$0.013 / useful result
One key. Every provider on this page.
Stop juggling signups and invoices. One Auxiliar API key calls all of them — upstream keys injected server-side, usage billed to a single balance. Swap the base URL and go.
curl https://api.auxiliar.ai/serper/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUXILIAR_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"q": "latest ai agent news"}'