You.com: Web Search APIs for AI
You.com helps developers and enterprises integrate web data into AI applications. It is designed for teams building RAG systems or AI agents that require grounded, citation-backed information.
At a glance
- Category
- Software Development
- Best for
- AI developers, Enterprise software teams, Data engineers, Companies building AI agents
- Pricing
- Freemium model with a $100 free credit. Usage-based fees apply, including $5.00 per 1k calls for the Search API and Research API tiers ranging from $10 to $300 per 1k requests.
- Key use cases
- RAG System Support, AI Agent Knowledge Retrieval, Competitive Intelligence, Market Research, Knowledge Base Construction
- Official website
- you.com/
You.com is a developer-focused platform providing three primary APIs: a Search API for real time web and news results, a Research API for synthesized answers with citations, and a Contents API for extracting text from specific URLs. It is designed for businesses building AI-driven tools, data pipelines, and knowledge bases.
The platform returns structured JSON and Markdown, which may reduce the amount of post-processing required by developers. For enterprise users, the tool includes SOC2 certification and data handling options such as zero data retention.
Buyers should note that this is a technical product requiring API integration. Costs vary between the lite and exhaustive tiers of the Research API based on the depth of reasoning required.
Key Features
Provides real time web and news results with LLM-optimized snippets and metadata.
Supports multi-step reasoning to provide natural language answers with inline citations.
Extracts Markdown or HTML content from a provided list of URLs.
Supports returning full-page content alongside search results via the Search API.
Supports querying using operators such as site:, filetype:, and Boolean logic.
Includes SOC2 certification and Zero Data Retention options for data privacy.
Use Cases
Using search snippets to provide real time context to LLMs to help reduce hallucinations.
Giving AI agents access to current facts, news, and domain knowledge via API.
Monitoring competitor pricing or feature pages by extracting content on a schedule.
Gathering cited information about markets or technologies using the Research API.
Using live crawling and the Contents API to ingest full-page Markdown into a vector store.
Best For
Pricing
Freemium model with a $100 free credit. Usage-based fees apply, including $5.00 per 1k calls for the Search API and Research API tiers ranging from $10 to $300 per 1k requests.
FAQ
You.com offers three main APIs: the Search API for real time web/news results, the Research API for cited natural language answers, and the Contents API for extracting clean text from URLs.
Pricing is based on the research effort tier: Lite ($10/1k), Standard ($50/1k), Deep ($100/1k), and Exhaustive ($300/1k).
Yes, the platform is SOC2 certified and offers Zero Data Retention, which allows queries and data to be automatically purged.
The Contents API is used when a list of URLs is already known, while the livecrawl parameter is used within the Search API to get full content for results discovered during a search.
Source category: Software Development
Source subcategory: API Management
