Top 9 Free Web Search API

If you need a free web search API for an AI agent, start with Tavily (1,000 free credits a month, no card) or Exa ($10 of free credit every month, no payment method). Brave gives $5 of monthly credit, Serper gives 2,500 free queries on signup, and SearXNG is $0 forever if you host it yourself. Every quota below was checked on each provider’s official pricing page on October 22, 2026.

Agents fire many searches per task, so a free tier that looks generous for a human can run dry in an afternoon. This guide compares nine free routes by what matters for agents: quota, rate limit, card requirement and response shape.

What is a free web search API?

A free web search API is an HTTP endpoint that takes a query and returns ranked web results (titles, URLs, snippets, sometimes full page text) at no cost up to a quota. Most free tiers today are monthly credit grants rather than unlimited access. AI-focused APIs return LLM-ready text; SERP APIs return Google-style result pages as JSON.

A SERP API (Serper, SerpApi) mirrors what a person sees on Google. An AI search API (Tavily, Exa, Linkup) trims page content for an agent’s context window, so you skip a separate scraping step.

Free web search APIs compared

“Not stated” means the official page didn’t say on October 22, 2026. Treat it as unknown, not unlimited.

The 9 free search APIs, one by one

1. Tavily: 1,000 free credits a month

Tavily’s free Researcher plan gives 1,000 API credits a month with no credit card. A basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced search costs 2, so you get 1,000 basic or 500 advanced searches. Development keys allow 100 requests per minute. It’s one POST https://api.tavily.com/search call with a Bearer token: the least friction for a first agent integration.

2. Exa: $10 of credit, refilled monthly

Exa’s free tier credits $10 the day you sign up and resets the balance to $10 on the first of every month. No payment method is required. At $4 per 1,000 Lite or Instant searches, that’s up to 2,500 searches; at $7 per 1,000 for Auto or Fast, it’s about 1,400. Its neural search is strong at “find pages like this” queries where keywords fail. We covered its agent tooling in the Exa MCP server guide.

3. Brave Search API: $5 of monthly credit

Brave moved to prepaid credits. The Search plan costs $5 per 1,000 requests and includes $5 of free credit every month, applied automatically, which works out to roughly 1,000 free requests. Capacity is 50 requests per second. Brave asks for a credit card at signup and says why on its pricing page: “To prevent abuse.” Results come from Brave’s own independent index. See Brave Search API with MCP for the agent setup.

4. Serper: 2,500 free Google queries

Serper’s homepage offers 2,500 free queries with no credit card required and returns Google results as JSON in 1 to 2 seconds. It’s a signup grant, not a monthly refill, so it suits prototyping more than production.

5. SerpApi: 250 searches a month

SerpApi’s free plan includes 250 searches per month with a throughput of 50 searches per hour. That’s small for an agent, but each result page comes back parsed into detailed structured fields. Use it when you need one engine-specific SERP feature, not bulk grounding.

6. Firecrawl: search and scrape together

Firecrawl’s Free Plan gives 1,000 credits a month, “no cost, no card”, which the pricing page equates to 500 searches or 1,000 scraped pages, with 2 concurrent requests. The advantage is that search and scraping share one API and one credit pool, so your agent can find pages and pull their full content without a second vendor.

7. Jina Search (s.jina.ai): 10M free tokens per key

Prepend https://s.jina.ai/?q= to a query and Jina returns the top five results with their content as clean, LLM-friendly text. Every new API key comes with 10M free tokens, and each search costs a fixed amount starting at 10,000 tokens, so the free grant covers up to about 1,000 searches. A free key gets 100 requests per minute. In our test on October 22, an anonymous call without a key returned 401 AuthenticationRequiredError (“blocked from performing anonymous queries due to bad IP reputation”), so plan on using a key.

8. Linkup: $20 monthly credit for work emails

Linkup credits $20 when you sign up with a professional email address and tops eligible accounts back up to $20 each month. Its pricing page frames that as “Run 4,000 queries for free.” Failed requests cost nothing.

9. SearXNG: self-hosted, no quota

SearXNG is an open-source metasearch engine you run on your own server or laptop. The software is free, and there’s no vendor quota. Two gotchas: JSON output must be enabled under the search: section of settings.yml (requesting an unset format returns 403 Forbidden), and many public instances disable JSON, so don’t build an agent on someone else’s instance.

Which free tier is gone, and which isn’t web search

Google’s Custom Search JSON API still lists 100 free queries per day, but Google’s overview page now says it is “closed to new customers”, and existing customers “have until January 1, 2027 to transition to an alternative solution.” If an old tutorial tells you to create a Programmable Search Engine key, skip it.

The DuckDuckGo Instant Answer API also shows up in these searches, but it returns topic summaries, not ranked web results, so it can’t be an agent’s main search tool.

If you run models locally, Ollama also offers a web search API that needs a free Ollama account; we walked through it in Ollama’s web search API with MCP. Its docs don’t publish a free search quota, so it isn’t in the table.

How to choose a free search API for your agent

Pick by the shape of your workload:

1. Prototype an agent this week: Tavily or Exa. Both refill monthly with no card.
2. High query rate: Brave, at 50 requests per second, if you’re fine adding a card.
3. You need Google’s exact results: Serper for volume, SerpApi for parsed SERP features.
4. You want page content, not snippets: Firecrawl or Jina.
5. Zero vendor dependency: SearXNG on your own server.

You can also stack them: call one provider first and fall back to a second on a 429 or an empty result.

Let your coding agent test the search API with Apidog CLI

Free quotas fail quietly: a balance hits zero or a response shape changes, and your agent answers from stale memory without an error. A daily contract test catches that. Let your coding agent write and run it with Apidog CLI.

Set up the CLI and the agent skill once:

npm install -g apidog-cli@latest
apidog login --with-token <YOUR_TOKEN>
npx -y skills add https://apidog.com   # pick your agent when prompted

Then give Claude Code, Codex or Cursor one prompt:

In Apidog project <projectId>, create an environment "tavily-free" with base URL
https://api.tavily.com. Create a test case for POST /search with body
{"query": "{{q}}", "search_depth": "basic", "max_results": 5} and header
Authorization: Bearer {{TAVILY_API_KEY}}. Assert status 200, a non-empty
results array, every result has a url, and response time under 3000 ms.
Add a second case with no Authorization header that asserts 401.
Run both and summarize any failures.

The agent reads the payload schema instead of guessing it, validates the file, writes the case and runs it:

apidog environment create tavily-free --project <projectId> --base-url https://api.tavily.com
apidog cli-schema get test-case-create
apidog cli-schema validate test-case-create --file case.json
apidog test-case category --project <projectId>
apidog test-case create --project <projectId> --file case.json
apidog run --test-case <caseId> --project <projectId> -e <envId> \
  --env-var "TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-xxxx" --env-var "q=apidog cli" -r cli,json

Each run spends 1 Tavily credit, so a daily check costs about 30 of your 1,000. To test another provider, ask the agent to swap the base URL and auth header (Brave uses X-Subscription-Token, Exa uses x-api-key) and keep the same assertions. Put the same apidog run line with -r junit into your pipeline, as shown in the Apidog CLI CI/CD guide, and add --upload-report if you want to view the run in the Apidog app. For agent-specific setup, see Apidog CLI in Claude Code. Apidog’s Free plan covers up to 4 users.

Make a free quota last longer

• Cache by query. Agents repeat searches inside one task, especially on retries.
• Default to the cheap mode. Tavily basic costs half of advanced; Exa Lite is $4 per 1,000 against $7 for Auto.
• Ask for 5 results, not 20. Agents rarely read past the top few.
• Fetch full pages selectively, only for the 1 or 2 URLs the agent picks.

FAQ

Is there a completely free web search API with no limits? Not as a hosted service. The closest is SearXNG on your own server, where the limit is your hardware.

Is the Brave Search API still free? Brave includes $5 of free credit every month on its Search plan, about 1,000 requests at $5 per 1,000. It asks for a credit card at signup to prevent abuse, and charges only for credits you buy.

Which free search API is best for AI agents? Tavily or Exa for most agents: LLM-ready content, monthly refills, no card.

Can I still get a free Google Custom Search API key? No. Google’s Custom Search JSON API is closed to new customers, and existing customers have until January 1, 2027 to move. Serper and SerpApi are the free routes to Google results.

Do free search API credits roll over? Don’t count on it. Exa resets your balance to $10 on the first of each month rather than adding to it, and Tavily, Brave and Firecrawl describe a monthly allowance without promising rollover. Serper’s and Jina’s free grants are one-time.

How do I know my agent’s search API is still working? Run a scheduled contract test like the Apidog CLI one above.

For more no-cost building blocks, see our list of free APIs and how to give a free LLM web search.