You.com provides web search, content extraction, and research APIs that give AI agents and LLM applications real-time access to web data with cited answers.
About
You.com is a developer platform that supplies real-time web data to AI applications through a family of APIs. The core problem it addresses is that large language models and AI agents have static training data and cannot answer questions about current events, live prices, or fresh web content on their own. You.com's APIs let a product search the live web, extract clean page content, and return cited, grounded answers without building a search or scraping stack in-house.
The platform is built on a real-time web index and splits its offering by how much reasoning the caller wants to do. The Web Search and Contents APIs return raw sources and parsed pages for developers who handle the reasoning themselves, while the Answer, Research, and Finance Research APIs perform multi-step research and return finished, cited answers. Developers can integrate through REST endpoints, official SDKs, hosted MCP servers, or plugins for coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex CLI.
Key Features
Pricing & Fees
- Pricing: Usage-based with a free tier. Web Search API Standard is $5 per 1,000 calls; Contents API is $1 per 1,000 pages; Answer API is $5 per 1,000 calls. Research runs from $12 (ResearchLite) to $1,200 (ResearchFrontier) per 1,000 calls; Finance Research Deep is $110 and Exhaustive is $500 per 1,000 calls. Enterprise plans are custom via sales.
- Free tier: 100 Web Search API queries per day through the MCP server with no API key, account, or credit card required.
- Pay-as-you-go model: No minimums, no seat fees, and no platform fee, with automatic top-up so production jobs do not stall.
- Integrations: MCP servers, REST APIs, SDKs, and plugins for agents including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, VS Code, and JetBrains IDEs.
Who It's For
You.com is aimed at developers and engineering teams building AI agents, assistants, or LLM applications that need current information beyond a model's training data. Typical users include agent builders wiring live web search into coding tools, RAG pipeline developers who need clean page extraction, and fintech teams performing grounded market or company research. It also suits enterprises with compliance requirements, since zero data retention, SOC 2 certification, and DPA support are available. Casual users looking for a consumer search page are not the primary audience of this API offering.
FAQ
What is You.com?You.com is a platform of Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research, and Finance Research APIs that give AI applications and agents real-time web data and cited answers.
Is there a free plan for You.com?Yes. The free tier allows 100 Web Search API queries per day through the MCP server with no API key or credit card, and paid usage starts at $5 per 1,000 standard search calls.
Which tools and platforms does You.com integrate with?It integrates through REST APIs, SDKs, and hosted MCP servers, and offers plugins for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, OpenCode, and Factory Droid.
How does the Research API differ from the Web Search API?The Web Search API returns sources for the developer to reason over, while the Research API plans, searches repeatedly, reads full pages, and cross-references before returning a finished, cited answer.
What privacy and compliance options does You.com offer?The platform supports zero data retention with automatic purging of queries, is SOC 2 certified, is designed to accommodate Data Processing Agreements, and offers custom QPS limits for enterprise customers.
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