{
  "slug": "search-the-web",
  "label": "search the web",
  "blurb": "Search APIs that give an agent fresh web results, with sources, to answer from.",
  "keywords": [
    "web search",
    "search engine",
    "serp",
    "search api"
  ],
  "categories": [
    "research",
    "browser-computer"
  ],
  "access": [
    "api",
    "mcp"
  ],
  "count": 27,
  "official": 14,
  "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/tasks/search-the-web",
  "browseUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/browse?task=search-the-web",
  "agentsUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/api/agents?task=search-the-web",
  "agents": [
    {
      "name": "Serper",
      "slug": "serper",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/serper",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/serper.png?v=9c1ac502",
      "description": "Fast Google search API returning structured SERP results, widely used to give agents fresh web results without scraping.",
      "provider": "Serper",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Cloudflare Web Search API",
      "slug": "cloudflare-web-search-api",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/cloudflare-web-search-api",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/cloudflare-web-search-api.png?v=7c4f193b",
      "description": "Returns structured web search results from Exa, Linkup, or Ceramic through Cloudflare's AI Gateway via REST or a Workers binding, for agents that need live web context.",
      "provider": "Cloudflare",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "infrastructure"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "bearer",
      "why": "Web Search as a Tool: Exposes web search as a tool that models can call during inference."
    },
    {
      "name": "Linkup",
      "slug": "linkup",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/linkup",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/linkup.png?v=58253408",
      "description": "Production-grade web search API for AI — sourced, cited answers with full-text snippets from trusted sources. REST API, Python/Node SDKs, and MCP server for agent workflows.",
      "provider": "Linkup Platform",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Search the web and return sourced, cited results with full-text snippets tuned for LLM consumption."
    },
    {
      "name": "Parallel",
      "slug": "parallel-web",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/parallel-web",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/parallel-web.png?v=eb93951f",
      "description": "Gives AI agents web search, URL extraction, and deep research APIs that return cited, structured results, with Python and TypeScript SDKs, a CLI, and hosted MCP servers.",
      "provider": "Parallel Web Systems",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "cli",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Search API: Runs natural-language web searches and returns ranked results with LLM-optimized excerpts sized for agent context windows."
    },
    {
      "name": "FlexQueries",
      "slug": "flexqueries",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/flexqueries",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/flexqueries.png?v=e732663d",
      "description": "Research keywords, SERPs, backlinks, competitors, rankings, site audits and AI visibility via a hosted OAuth MCP server and a 134-endpoint REST API, billed as pay-as-you-go prepaid credits.",
      "provider": "FlexQueries",
      "categories": [
        "sales-marketing",
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "AI Mode SERPs: Fetch AI Mode search results for a tracked project through the /projects/{project_id}/serps/ai-mode endpoint."
    },
    {
      "name": "Jina Reader",
      "slug": "jina-reader",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/jina-reader",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/jina-reader.png?v=6719c226",
      "description": "Web reader and search API for AI pipelines. Converts any URL to clean markdown, runs grounded search, and powers RAG at scale — no browser automation needed.",
      "provider": "Jina AI",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "context.dev",
      "slug": "context-dev",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/context-dev",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/context-dev.png?v=9cc9151e",
      "description": "Scrapes, crawls and searches the web for agents through a REST API, SDKs, CLI and hosted MCP server, returning LLM-ready Markdown, structured fields and company brand data.",
      "provider": "context.dev",
      "categories": [
        "browser-computer",
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp",
        "cli"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search and Answers: Searches the web with page content via /v1/web/search, or researches a task and returns JSON with sources via /v1/web/answers."
    },
    {
      "name": "Nimble",
      "slug": "nimble",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/nimble",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/nimble.png?v=14f6c1a5",
      "description": "Searches, extracts, maps and crawls the live web and runs cited research agents, for AI agents that need real-time web data, via REST API, SDKs, a CLI, and a hosted MCP server.",
      "provider": "Nimble",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "browser-computer"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp",
        "cli"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Runs real-time web search across multiple engines with configurable depth and focus, returning structured results."
    },
    {
      "name": "You.com Search API",
      "slug": "you-com-search-api",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/you-com-search-api",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/you-com-search-api.png?v=918b26a2",
      "description": "Programmable AI search with web, news, and RAG endpoints — grounded answers with citations for AI applications.",
      "provider": "You.com",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Keenable",
      "slug": "keenable",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/keenable",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/keenable.png?v=c7bb01f1",
      "description": "Serves a hundred-billion-document web index built for agents rather than human search pages, returning dense structured results over an API and MCP endpoint.",
      "provider": "Keenable",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "infrastructure",
        "data-analytics"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Queries a purpose-built agent index and returns structured results rather than ranked page links."
    },
    {
      "name": "Z.ai API Platform",
      "slug": "zai-api",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/zai-api",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/zai-api.png?v=295ec6d5",
      "description": "Serves Z.ai's GLM models through an HTTP API and official Python and Java SDKs, with function calling, web search, image and video generation, and document layout parsing.",
      "provider": "Z.ai",
      "categories": [
        "language",
        "infrastructure"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Runs LLM-oriented web searches through the Web Search API and built-in tool."
    },
    {
      "name": "Kimi API Platform",
      "slug": "kimi-api",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/kimi-api",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/kimi-api.png?v=e839cc9b",
      "description": "Serves Moonshot AI's Kimi models through OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions, Responses, and Anthropic-compatible Messages APIs, with tool calling, web search, and a 1M-token context.",
      "provider": "Moonshot AI",
      "categories": [
        "language",
        "infrastructure"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Adds web search through the built-in $web_search tool or the search and URL-fetch tool endpoints."
    },
    {
      "name": "Exa AI",
      "slug": "exa-ai",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/exa-ai",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/exa-ai.png?v=337595cf",
      "description": "Neural search engine API that understands meaning — find similar pages, search by content type, and get clean extracted text.",
      "provider": "Exa",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Perplexity Sonar",
      "slug": "perplexity-sonar",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/perplexity-sonar",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/perplexity-sonar.png?v=80d7a104",
      "description": "AI search API delivering grounded, cited answers with real-time web access — power your apps with Perplexity's search intelligence.",
      "provider": "Perplexity",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Tako",
      "slug": "tako",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/tako",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/tako.png?v=f26086dc",
      "description": "Live web search plus licensed datasets for agents, covering company financials, macroeconomic indicators, web traffic, and government spending.",
      "provider": "TakoData",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "data-analytics"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Tavily",
      "slug": "tavily",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/tavily",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/tavily.png?v=fd6d551c",
      "description": "Search API built specifically for AI agents — optimized for LLM consumption with structured results, content extraction, and answer generation.",
      "provider": "Tavily",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "ToolUniverse",
      "slug": "tooluniverse",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/tooluniverse",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/tooluniverse.png?v=bde49943",
      "description": "Curates a large collection of scientific tools and MCP servers for AI scientists, exposing biomedical and research APIs through one Python SDK.",
      "provider": "Harvard MIMS Lab",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "orchestration",
        "autonomous-agents"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "none",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Brave Search MCP",
      "slug": "brave-search-mcp",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/brave-search-mcp",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/brave-search-mcp.png?v=afa8da91",
      "description": "Brave Search MCP server. Gives AI agents privacy-preserving web and local search with an independent index — no Google dependency, no tracking, structured results.",
      "provider": "Brave",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "mcp",
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Run web searches against Brave's independent index and return ranked, structured results"
    },
    {
      "name": "xAI API",
      "slug": "xai-api",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/xai-api",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/xai-api.png?v=7e71e335",
      "description": "Serves xAI's Grok models through an OpenAI-compatible Responses API with function calling, web search, voice, and image generation, for developers building on Grok.",
      "provider": "xAI",
      "categories": [
        "language",
        "infrastructure"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Web Search: Lets Grok search the web and browse pages in real time to answer with current information."
    },
    {
      "name": "LLM Wiki",
      "slug": "llm-wiki",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/llm-wiki",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/llm-wiki.png?v=84c41a45",
      "description": "Builds and maintains an interlinked wiki from your documents in a desktop app, and exposes hybrid search, graph and file reads to agents through a local HTTP API and MCP server.",
      "provider": "nashsu",
      "categories": [
        "memory-state",
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp",
        "browser-extension"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "Deep Research: Generates research topics from the wiki, runs multi-query web search via Tavily, SerpApi or SearXNG, and ingests the results."
    },
    {
      "name": "WeKnora",
      "slug": "weknora",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/weknora",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/weknora.png?v=8859ab3f",
      "description": "Turns documents into a queryable knowledge base with RAG question answering, a ReAct agent orchestrating retrieval, MCP tools and web search, and an auto-generated wiki.",
      "provider": "Tencent",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "customer-support",
        "communication"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp",
        "cli",
        "browser-extension"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "ReAct Reasoning Agent: Runs progressive multi-step ReAct reasoning that autonomously chains knowledge retrieval, MCP tools and web search to reach an…"
    },
    {
      "name": "AI21 Studio",
      "slug": "ai21-studio",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/ai21-studio",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/ai21-studio.png?v=1828ea2c",
      "description": "Serves AI21's Jamba models and the Maestro agent-run API with file search, web search and remote MCP tools, for enterprises building grounded RAG agents.",
      "provider": "AI21 Labs",
      "categories": [
        "language",
        "infrastructure",
        "orchestration"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": "File Search and Web Search: Grounds Maestro answers in uploaded documents and live web results."
    },
    {
      "name": "Geoloods",
      "slug": "geoloods",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/geoloods",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/geoloods.png?v=f5cadb20",
      "description": "Resolves named places (cities, towns, villages, parks, landmarks) to coordinates plus country, timezone and population data over a JSON HTTP API. Not street-level addresses or venue search.",
      "provider": "Softwareloods",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "data-analytics"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "GPT Researcher",
      "slug": "gpt-researcher",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/gpt-researcher",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/gpt-researcher.png?v=303c328c",
      "description": "Autonomous deep-research agent that plans queries, browses the web in parallel, and produces cited research reports in minutes. Supports API and MCP integration.",
      "provider": "Assaf Elovic",
      "categories": [
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "MaxKB",
      "slug": "maxkb",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/maxkb",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/maxkb.png?v=d194eac5",
      "description": "Open-source enterprise RAG platform for building AI agents. Upload docs, auto-vectorize, and orchestrate multi-step workflows with MCP tool-use and a visual workflow engine.",
      "provider": "1Panel",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "infrastructure"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "cli"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Oxylabs MCP",
      "slug": "oxylabs-mcp",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/oxylabs-mcp",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/oxylabs-mcp.png?v=2ca92dd8",
      "description": "Lets AI agents scrape any URL with JavaScript rendering and geo-targeting, pull Google and Amazon results, and crawl sites with AI extraction, via the official Oxylabs MCP server.",
      "provider": "Oxylabs",
      "categories": [
        "research",
        "browser-computer"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": false,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "bearer",
      "why": null
    },
    {
      "name": "Profound",
      "slug": "profound",
      "url": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/agents/profound",
      "iconUrl": "https://agentswitchboard.dev/icons/profound.png?v=0cb7bdcb",
      "description": "Tracks and shapes how brands appear inside AI search and answer engines, exposing visibility analytics to agents through a REST API and hosted MCP server.",
      "provider": "Profound",
      "categories": [
        "sales-marketing",
        "data-analytics",
        "research"
      ],
      "accessMethods": [
        "api",
        "mcp"
      ],
      "verified": true,
      "official": true,
      "featured": false,
      "authType": "apiKey",
      "why": null
    }
  ],
  "relatedTasks": [
    "scrape-websites",
    "search-my-documents",
    "automate-a-browser",
    "control-a-computer"
  ],
  "stacks": [
    "research-analyst"
  ]
}