26 web search APIs for agents: cheapest start at $0.60/1K, but only 6 prove they run their own index

Asked:

“Which web search APIs for AI agents exist, with price per 1k requests and whether they have their own index?”

A researched catalog of 26 currently available products as of 9 November 2026 — AI-native search APIs, independent-index APIs, SERP APIs, and model-integrated search tools — drawn from 19 source hosts, one source per product. It is a catalog, not a provably exhaustive universe: no authoritative registry of such APIs exists. Prices are headline rates per 1,000 requests; “Undisclosed” index ownership means the cited source does not say, not that the answer is no.

Headline price per 1,000 requests, colored by index ownership

Own index — explicit Third-party engine — explicit Undisclosed in cited source

Sorted by headline USD rate. Mojeek (£2/1K GBP) and Bright Data’s per-result SERP ($0.0015/result) have no directly comparable USD/request rate and sit at the bottom unscaled. Rates are not apples-to-apples: queued vs live modes, result counts, plan commitments and token add-ons differ — hover a bar for the caveat.

Only 6 of 26 products explicitly operate or use their provider’s own index: brave.com ($3/1K, 30B+ pages), Exa, Mwmbl, Perplexity, Mojeek, and Google Search behind Gemini grounding.

The cheapest headline rate, DataForSEO at $0.60/1K, is queue-only — Live mode is not available, and each extra page of 10 results adds one base price — per dataforseo.com.

“Undisclosed” is not “no”: Linkup states no dependency on third-party search engines yet does not name who crawls its general-web index, per linkup.so; 14 of 26 products fall in this bucket.

Model-integrated tools sit at the costly end — OpenAI web search is $10/1K plus search content tokens at model rates (r.jina.ai), and Gemini grounding with Google Search is $14/1K on Gemini 3 models (r.jina.ai).

Every product and caveat

Product	Kind	Price / 1K	Own index	Index details	Free tier	Pricing caveat	Source

Researched catalog of 26 web-search API products for AI agents, one row per product, compiled as of 2026-11-09 from 19 independent source hosts (no URL backs more than one row; some official pages read via the r.jina.ai text proxy). Prices are headline per-1,000-request rates from each provider’s cited pricing or product page; USD axis values are the lowest directly comparable rate, so queued/plan/credit terms differ by product. Index ownership is a strict Yes/No/Undisclosed read of the cited source only. Mojeek (GBP) and Bright Data per-result pricing are shown but not placed on the USD scale.

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