
Tavily
A search API built for AI agents, returning answers and sources, not ten blue links.
Visit Tavily Free 1,000 credits/mo; paid plans from $30/mo
What is Tavily?
Tavily is a web search API designed for LLM applications: send a query and get back relevant, cleaned page content and optional synthesised answers, optimised for feeding straight into an agent or RAG pipeline.
Key features
- Search API with LLM-optimised result content
- Extract API to pull clean text from specific URLs
- Topic, depth, and recency controls
- Included answer synthesis when you want it
- First-class integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and CrewAI
Pros
- Purpose-built for agents — results arrive ready to use
- Generous free tier for prototyping
- Very simple API surface
Cons
- Not a consumer search engine
- Result quality depends on the underlying index for niche topics
- Credit pricing needs watching for high-frequency agents
Best for
Developers giving agents live web accessRAG systems that need fresh informationResearch automations
Alternatives to Tavily
Exa AI
Search engine designed for AI agents and developers.
FreemiumFree 1k searches/mo, Pro from $25/mo
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Turn any website into clean, LLM-ready markdown with one API call.
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Released April 2024Perplexity
4.7
AI search engine that gives you answers with sources.
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Released August 2022

