Chinese AI company DeepSeek has opened its internally developed search engine to outside developers through two new APIs, charging $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, according to an announcement the company made Saturday. The Search and Fetch APIs allow developers to retrieve live web search results and webpage content for use in their own applications and AI agents, and both services can be used independently of DeepSeek's AI models. The launch positions DeepSeek as a challenger in the growing market for AI-focused search infrastructure, where it's competing against both established players and newer entrants building their own crawling and indexing systems.
The Search endpoint delivers ranked web results that include titles, URLs, snippets, and summaries, while the Fetch endpoint retrieves the contents of individual webpages in Markdown format, according to the report. DeepSeek says its internally developed search engine, dubbed DeepSeek Search, already processes hundreds of millions of requests daily and maintains an index containing hundreds of billions of webpages. The engine supports multilingual searches and uses filtering mechanisms designed to identify search spam, low-quality AI-generated material, and attempts to manipulate search rankings, according to its October 17 changelog. The company has waived Search and Fetch charges temporarily for server-side tool calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex when using its API, but that arrangement ends on October 31, when standard per-request charges take effect.
The report notes that neither API requires a separate model request, meaning developers can integrate DeepSeek's search capabilities into applications powered by competing AI models. For context, accessing DeepSeek's native search through its agent harness previously required an additional model request, with each search running as a separate call to a DeepSeek model, introducing extra latency and token costs. The company has been building toward this launch for months: Bloomberg reported in January that DeepSeek was recruiting engineers to build a multilingual AI search engine, with planned capabilities extending beyond text searches to include images and audio. Before developing its own infrastructure, DeepSeek relied on outside providers—Chinese business publication National Business Daily reported in March 2025 that DeepSeek had integrated the search API of Bocha, a Chinese AI search startup, while the company's February 2025 privacy policy acknowledged its use of Microsoft's Bing as an external API provider.
Large language models can't answer questions about recent events or dynamic information because they're trained on data collected up to a certain point in time, the report explains. By supporting live web search, models can retrieve current information from the internet to supplement their responses—particularly important for developers building AI agents that might need to consult the latest software documentation, investigate a recently disclosed vulnerability, or check that a library has been updated. DeepSeek's pricing is competitive but not the cheapest available: Ceramic.ai charges $0.25 per 1,000 queries on its pay-as-you-go plan, while Parallel's Turbo and Fast search services and Perplexity's Fast Search API both charge $1 per 1,000 searches. Exa charges $4 per 1,000 Instant Search requests, Brave charges $5 per 1,000 searches, and Tavily charges $8 per 1,000 basic searches. The various services differ in retrieval capabilities, result limits, and performance, so the prices aren't entirely comparable, but they provide useful benchmarks for DeepSeek's entry into the search infrastructure space.
The emergence of these alternatives comes as Google and Microsoft have withdrawn longstanding search API offerings—Microsoft retired its Bing Search APIs in August 2025, while Google has closed its Custom Search JSON API to new customers, with existing users required to migrate by January 1, 2027. Both companies continue to provide search functionality through their respective AI platforms, but standalone APIs like DeepSeek's give developers direct access to search results they can use with any AI models and applications of their choosing. Developer reaction has been mixed: one Reddit user welcomed the pricing, writing "I don't think any other search provider comes close to the price that DeepSeek is offering," while others questioned what would ultimately change for users already accessing web search through third-party tools. For businesses weighing the APIs, there are practical considerations: DeepSeek's privacy policy states that it collects, processes, and stores personal data in China and generally keeps user inputs for as long as an account remains open, though the Search and Fetch documentation doesn't specify how long search queries are retained. Search and Fetch requests are each capped at five per second per account, though individual searches can return up to 50 results without increasing the request price. The proliferation of independent search providers reflects a broader shift as more companies invest in their own infrastructure with AI applications squarely in mind, rather than relying solely on Google and Microsoft's web-scale indexes. Building this type of infrastructure requires systems to crawl webpages, maintain an index of their contents, rank results, and continuously update that information as the web changes—no small undertaking, but one that companies from Brave to Cloudflare are now pursuing.