You.com API

What is You.com API?

You.com API gives developers programmatic access to a real-time web index through several endpoints that differ in how much reasoning they do for you. The Web Search API returns web and news results with snippets and metadata, so your model does the synthesis, which suits retrieval-augmented generation. The Contents API turns URLs you already have into clean Markdown or HTML, the Answer API returns a citation-backed answer in one call, and a deep-research endpoint plans searches, reads full pages and cross-checks sources across five effort tiers. A Finance Research variant targets company, market and filings questions, and an Inference Router runs open-weight models through one API. Everything is available through a REST API, SDKs and an MCP server. The free tier allows 100 Web Search queries a day via MCP with no key or account, Web Search costs $5 per 1,000 calls on pay-as-you-go, and enterprise plans add zero data retention, SOC 2 and custom capacity.

Use cases

• Ground an LLM in live web results
• Extract clean Markdown from URLs
• Get a cited answer in one API call
• Run multi-step research reports
• Analyze company and market data
• Give an AI agent search through MCP

Who it's for

• Developers
• AI engineers
• Agent builders
• Enterprise teams

Why use You.com API

• Per-call pricing with no minimums, seats or platform fee keeps costs tied to usage.
• You choose how much work the API does, from raw results to a finished cited answer.
• A keyless MCP profile lets you try live search in an agent before creating an account.
• Pages are billed only when crawled live, and cached pages carry no extraction charge.
• Enterprise options cover data retention controls, DPA readiness and dedicated support.

You.com API features

• Web Search API with web and news results in one request
• Up to 100 results per call with country and language filters
• Contents API returning Markdown or HTML per page
• Answer API with inline numbered citations
• Research API with five effort levels from Lite to Frontier
• Finance Research API over filings, prices and financial news
• Inference Router for open-weight models
• MCP server and Python SDK
• Auto top-up for credits
• Zero data retention and SOC 2 for enterprise

You.com API integrations

• MCP
• Python SDK
• OpenAPI

How to get started with You.com API

1. Try the free tier through the MCP server without an API key, or create an account and key.
2. Pick an endpoint: Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research or Finance Research.
3. Send requests with the X-API-Key header from the REST API, Python SDK or MCP.
4. Add credits and enable auto top-up so production jobs do not stall.
5. Move to an enterprise agreement for custom limits and zero data retention.

You.com API limitations

• The free tier is capped at 100 Web Search queries per day via MCP
• Full page extraction is billed separately at $1.00 per 1,000 pages crawled live
• Higher Research tiers can take minutes, and Frontier runs in background mode only
• Zero data retention and custom concurrency need an enterprise agreement

You.com API pricing

Yes, You.com API has a free plan. Paid plans start at $5 usage-based, according to the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026.

You.com API plans

• Free

  Free

  • No API key, account or credit card
  • 100 Web Search API queries per day via MCP
  • Sign up only when you need more

• Pay as you go

  $5 per 1,000 calls

  Web Search API; Contents is $1 per 1,000 pages

  • No minimums, no seats, no platform fee
  • All endpoints, SDKs and MCP
  • Auto top-up

• Enterprise

  Custom

  • Zero Data Retention, SOC 2, DPA-ready
  • Custom QPS and dedicated capacity
  • SLA-backed support

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

You.com API alternatives

The main You.com API alternatives listed on Debuly are Tavily, Exa, Brave Search API, Perplexity Sonar API, SerpApi and Serper. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   Brave Search API

   Search API built on Brave's own web index, with LLM Context, web, news, image, video and place endpoints for apps and AI agents.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   PaidVisit Brave Search API (official site)
2. 

   Exa

   Web search API for AI agents and apps that returns relevant passages with citations, billed pay-as-you-go from a free monthly credit.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Exa (official site)
3. 

   Perplexity Sonar API

   Pay-as-you-go Perplexity API for web-grounded answers, ranked search results, embeddings and typed decisions, with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

   Developer platformsResearch and search
   PaidVisit Perplexity Sonar API (official site)
4. 

   SerpApi

   Real-time search engine results API that returns Google and other SERP data as structured JSON, handling proxies and CAPTCHAs.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit SerpApi (official site)
5. 

   Serper

   Google Search API that returns organic results, knowledge graph and related data as structured JSON in one to two seconds.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit Serper (official site)
6. 

   Tavily

   Web search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents and RAG, with a free tier of 1,000 credits a month.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Tavily (official site)

You.com API FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from cdn.prod.website-files.com · fetched 24 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

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