Web search and retrieval APIs built for LLMs and agents — clean results, page contents, RAG. Ranked by community traction, with live GitHub stars and what each is best at.
Short answer: the best search & retrieval apis for AI agents by community traction is Brave Search API (★ 0), followed by Exa and Firecrawl.
Independent search-index API (web, news, images) with an LLM-focused Answers/Grounding endpoint, from a privacy-first crawler. Best for agent builders.
Neural/semantic web search API purpose-built for AI agents, returning clean results plus full page contents and highlights. Best for agent builders.
Web-data API to search, scrape, crawl and map sites into clean markdown/structured data for LLMs — one call returns full page content. Best for agent builders.
Google's official JSON API to query a Programmable Search Engine — a cheap, widely-used web/image search baseline for retrieval. Best for agent builders.
URL-to-LLM-markdown reader (r.jina.ai) and web search (s.jina.ai) that work with a simple URL prefix — even without an API key. Best for agent builders.
Privacy-first, ad-free search API from Kagi with high-quality results, plus a FastGPT/Summarizer endpoint for LLMs. Best for agent builders.
Production-grade web search API for AI that returns sourced, cited answers or raw results to reduce hallucination. Best for agent builders.
Search API built from the ground up for AI agents — pass an objective and get URLs plus token-relevant compressed excerpts. Best for agent builders.
Search-grounded LLM API (Sonar models) that returns cited answers with live web search built in, plus a raw Search API. Best for agent builders.
Real-time SERP API across 20+ engines (Google, Bing, YouTube, Maps, Scholar) with a pay-for-success model and structured JSON. Best for agent builders.
Real-time SERP scraping API returning structured JSON from Google and 20+ engines (maps, news, shopping, scholar). Best for agent builders.
Fast, low-cost Google Search API returning structured JSON (organic, knowledge graph, news, images, places) for agents and SEO. Best for agent builders.
Web search, extract, crawl and map API built specifically for LLMs and AI agents, returning LLM-ready structured results. Best for agent builders.
Search API for agents unifying web plus 50+ proprietary sources (academic papers, SEC filings, financial data, clinical trials). Best for agent builders.
Real-time web search, page-contents, and multi-step research APIs for AI apps, with a free keyless MCP endpoint. Best for agent builders.
By community traction, Brave Search API (★ 0) leads the search & retrieval apis in our directory. Independent search-index API (web, news, images) with an LLM-focused Answers/Grounding endpoint, from a privacy-first crawler.
Brave Search API is the most-starred open-source option; Exa and Firecrawl are strong runners-up.
Brave Search API, at ★ 0 (live count).
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