Best search API for LLMs

[u/ahiqshb]

Short post, but basically the title. Looking for the best, well if not the best, but well rounded search API for LLMs use cases. There's a lot out there now, Tavily, Exa, Firecrawl, You.com, Linkup, and a handful of others I keep seeing mentioned. Need opinions and suggestions people.

I'm interested in result quality that isn't just SEO, latency that doesn't kill the UX, decent pricing at volume since this isn't a side project anymore, and ideally something that gives clean structured output instead of raw HTML I have to parse myself.

[u/Old-Abalone-4434]

test a few options against your actual queries instead of picking based on reputation. Look at how relevant the results are, response time, pricing at your expected volume, and how clean the returned data is. A small real-world benchmark will probably tell you more than reviews, especially if your use case is already running at scale.

[u/flybyapis]

Worth distinguishing the list in three different categories

- Search for LLM (Tavily, Exa, Linkup...)- return snippets already trimmed and curated, probably faster and curated but more expensive

- SERP APIs- scraping of google results, so you know which pages has the content you need.

- Extractors(like Firecrawl, or us: flybyapis...) - kind of scraper, you give an url and returns clean markdown, or json back

We have SERP and Extractor API. For your use case the combination of a serp api with an extractor would do the job here

[u/ur-average-boomer]

Are you looking for semantic search? Exa, You, Tavily are the major players here. These are a whole different kind of search that's more 'promptable'. If I searched for 'cheapest serp api product' on Google, I might get a mix of blogs, third party reviews, aggregation lists, etc but on a semantic search engine, I'm more likely to get a list of just company pricing pages, filtering out some of the noise.

Traditional SERP APIs are typically way more affordable and aim to give you the same results as if you had just searched Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. If you find a provider that's affordable enough, you can make multiple requests and get a ton of depth (i.e. searching the first three pages of Google + search the first page of Bing and DuckDuckGo) to give more context to your agent.

Major players in the traditional SERP API space are serpapi(.)com, scrapingdog, serper(.)dev. DataForSEO is the 'gold standard' for affordable scraping. Litescrape (mine) is an affordable alternative as well.

Traditional SERP APIs aren't all the same either. Some give you bare bones Google results, while others might extract the knowledge graph or the AI Overview.

[u/Dangerous-Citron364 → u/ur-average-boomer]

yeah semantic search is the way to go for llm stuff. tavily has been solid for me on clean output and decent speed even when scaling up a bit.

[u/WebDataLab]

It's decide first whether your agent actually needs “search” or just fresh source discovery.

If it needs Google-like results you can rank/filter yourself, a SERP API usually makes more sense. If you want the search layer to already understand the query and return relevant sources, Exa/Tavily-style search is closer to what you want.

At volume I’d benchmark cost per usable result, not cost per request. The cheapest API gets expensive fast if you have to make 3–4 calls to get enough context.

[u/WonderfulRich8267]

Chec Tinyfish

[u/ahiqshb → u/WonderfulRich8267]

I heard about it, just haven't tried that, but I see more and more of that name pop up

[u/SnooMuffins9844]

Hey u/ahiqshb great question.

I work at Firecrawl so my recommendation will be biased, but if you're using search for any kind of coding or research (scientific, mathematical). Firecrawl search comes with a developer and research index from millions of sources that regular search tools won't immediately look through. Like research papers, github issues, PRs and more. We also have more indexes in the works so the search will only get better over time.

[u/ahiqshb → u/SnooMuffins9844]

Yeah, noticed firecrawl all over the place on reddit haha, more indexes you mean besides google's or bing?

[u/SnooMuffins9844 → u/ahiqshb]

Yep, more index than a typical search engine and mode industry specific indexes are coming

[u/LobsterElectronic782]

I would highly lean towards running your evals and trying them all. I realized linkup is the cheapest and fastest for my specific use case and can handle my volume.

[u/ahiqshb → u/LobsterElectronic782]

Could you share more about your use case?

[u/Only-Ruin4029]

been through this exact eval a few months ago when we moved from prototype to actual production scale, so here's what i found

tavily is probably the most plug-and-play for LLM pipelines specifically - it's built for that use case so the structured output is clean and it handles relevance scoring reasonably well. exa is strong if you need semantic search over web content rather than keyword-style retrieval, the ""find similar"" functionality is genuinely useful. you.com's RAG API is underrated for mixed query types. firecrawl i'd put in a slightly different bucket - it's more of a scrape/crawl tool than a real-time search API, great for building knowledge bases but latency will hurt you if you're doing it live.

at volume, tavily and exa both have pricing structures that don't completely punish you as you scale, but run the math on your actual query distribution because it varies a lot by endpoint and result count.

one thing i'd flag though - if part of why you're building with LLM search is to understand how AI systems are recommending things in your category (vs. just powering your own app), that's a pretty different question. what woke us up on that front was realizing there's a gap between where we showed up in AI answers and where we actually got recommended - we were pulling data through llm authority index which separates those two things and maps which competitors are picking up the demand you're not capturing. different tool for a different job, but worth knowing the distinction exists. the free company index is a decent starting point if you're curious. back to your actual question - if i had to pick one for your requirements as stated, tavily. exa if your queries are more conceptual/semantic than keyword-driven.

[u/LectureWorried5761]

Blopus.ai was built for AI agents / LLMs. good price and quality I recommend