Web search APIs for agents
Tavily, Exa, Brave Search, Parallel and Perplexity compared on endpoints, index, list price per 1,000 searches, free allowance and MCP support, for agents that need fresh web results.
Comparison
| Entry | Endpoints | Index | Search price | Free allowance | MCP server | Agent extras |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tavily API | Search, Extract, Crawl, Map, Research | Not stated in the sources used | Credit-based; credits per call depend on the endpoint and depth | 1,000 API credits per month, no card; free for students | Yes, remote at mcp.tavily.com/mcp with OAuth or an API key (tavily-mcp) | tvly CLI that also installs Agent Skills; docs MCP server |
| Exa API | Search (several depths), Contents, Answer, Monitors, Exa Agent | Own web index | From $4 per 1,000 requests (up to 10 results); contents $1 per 1,000 pages | $10 of credits per month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, no payment method | Yes, hosted at mcp.exa.ai/mcp, no API key needed to start; open source (exa-mcp-server) | Agent Skills (npx skills add exa-labs/agent-skills), Claude connector |
| Brave Search API | Web, news, images, videos, local and LLM context; Answers; spellcheck and autosuggest | Own independent index, 40+ billion pages | $5 per 1,000 requests; Answers $4 per 1,000 queries plus tokens | $5 of credits every month | Yes, brave-search-mcp-server (stdio by default, HTTP optional) | Goggles to re-rank or exclude domains |
| Parallel Web APIs | Search, Extract, Task (deep research), Responses, Monitor, FindAll | Not stated in the sources used | $0.001 to $0.005 per request for 10 results ($1 to $5 per 1,000) | Up to 5,000 requests per month free; $5 monthly credit and up to $80 at signup | Yes (Search MCP and Task MCP) | Compressed excerpts sized for LLM context; structured outputs with citations and confidence on Task |
| Perplexity API Platform | Search API (raw results), Sonar and Agent APIs (grounded answers), Embeddings | Not stated in the sources used | $5 per 1,000 requests, no token costs | Not stated in the sources used | Yes (Perplexity API MCP server) | Multi-provider Agent API for web-grounded answers |
Verdict: For raw results to feed your own agent, Exa, Brave and Parallel are the most transparent on price, and Brave is the only one stating index size. Tavily is the easiest all-in-one (search, extract, crawl and research behind one key and an OAuth MCP server). Choose Perplexity or Parallel's Task API when you want the provider to do the research and return a cited answer.
What these APIs are for
A model's training data is months old, and a general web search engine returns pages built for people. These APIs return results built for a model: clean text or excerpts, sometimes full page contents, in one call, priced per request. All five offer an MCP server, so a harness such as Claude Code or Codex can use them without custom code; see the remote MCP guide.
They split into two groups:
- Search primitives return ranked results and excerpts, and your agent does the reading and reasoning: Exa Search, Brave Search, Parallel Search, the Perplexity Search API and Tavily Search.
- Research endpoints run a multi-step search and return a cited answer or a structured result: Tavily Research, Exa Answer and Exa Agent, Parallel Task, Perplexity Sonar and Agent APIs, and Brave Answers. They save agent turns but hide the intermediate steps, which makes them harder to audit.
Choosing
- Price per search ranges from about $1 to $5 per 1,000 basic requests among the vendors that publish per-request prices; deeper modes, more results and page contents add to that. Tavily prices in credits whose cost depends on the endpoint and depth.
- Index. Brave and Exa run their own indexes, and Brave publishes a size (40+ billion pages, with 100+ million page updates a day). The others don't state where results come from in the pages used here.
- Reading pages. If your agent needs full text, check whether contents come in the same call (Exa Contents, Tavily Extract, Parallel Extract) or need a separate reader such as Firecrawl or Jina Reader.
- MCP auth. Exa's hosted server works without a key to start, and Tavily's supports OAuth, which keeps keys out of config files. Brave's server now defaults to stdio and needs
BRAVE_MCP_TRANSPORT=httpfor HTTP. - Evaluate on your own queries. Quality varies by domain (news, code, academic, local). Run a fixed set of 20 to 50 real queries through two or three APIs and compare what your agent does with the results.
For a full research setup built on these, see the research agent stack.
Directory entries in this comparison
- Tavily API: Real-time web layer for AI agents: search, extract, crawl, map and cited research returned as clean LLM-ready content.
- Exa API: Search and retrieval API built for AI agents, backed by Exa's own continuously updated web index and search models.
- Brave Search API: Web search API on Brave's independent index of 40+ billion pages, with specialized endpoints for search, AI grounding and more.
- Parallel Web APIs: Web APIs for AI agents (Search, Extract, Task/Deep Research, FindAll, Monitor) for research, extraction and continuous monitoring.
- Perplexity API Platform: Perplexity's API platform with Agent, Search and Embeddings APIs for real-time, web-grounded research and Q&A.
- Tavily MCP Server: Tavily's MCP server with real-time web search, extract, map and crawl tools.
- Exa MCP Server: Official Exa MCP server connecting agents to Exa for web search, content fetching and multi-step research.
- Brave Search MCP Server: Official MCP server for the Brave Search API: web, local, image, video and news search plus LLM context and summarization (stdio or HTTP).
- Firecrawl API: Web data API for AI agents: search the web, scrape any page to clean data and interact with it through one API.
- Jina Reader: Converts any URL into LLM-friendly Markdown by prefixing it with https://r.jina.ai/.
Related
- Research agent stack (Stack)
- Connect an agent to a remote MCP server (Guide)
- Coding agent starter stack (Stack)
Sources
- Tavily docs index (llms.txt), accessed
- Tavily pricing, accessed
- Exa docs index (llms.txt), accessed
- Exa pricing, accessed
- Exa docs, Exa MCP, accessed
- Brave Search API, accessed
- Brave Search API pricing, accessed
- Brave Search MCP server README, accessed
- Parallel pricing, accessed
- Parallel docs index (llms.txt), accessed
- Perplexity docs, Pricing, accessed
- Perplexity docs index (llms.txt), accessed