How to choose: Best Web Search API

Five steps to choose a web search API

1. Write down the job. Decide whether your app needs links, excerpts, full pages or a cited answer.
2. Set a latency budget for a single call and for a full agent task, and note the percentile you care about.
3. Decide how fresh results must be, and which date filters you need to meet that.
4. Shortlist two or three APIs from different families, such as an answer API, a neural search API and an independent index.
5. Compare the public price per query and per page read, then check each vendor's current terms for caching and reuse of results.

Test it yourself with a pilot

Pick 50 to 100 questions from real users, and include a few exact-name lookups, a few questions about recent events, and a few that need a table or a long page. Write down the source or answer you expect for each one before you run any API.

Run each shortlisted API on the same questions, with the same model and the same prompt. Record the result count, latency, token use and whether the expected source appeared. For cited answers, check that each quote supports the claim it sits beside.

Repeat the pilot after two or three weeks, because rankings and indexes change. Keep the scoring sheet, and let the results decide the choice rather than any single benchmark, including ours.

Score each result on a simple three-step scale, such as useful, partly useful and not useful, so two reviewers reach the same grade. Keep the question set private, so no vendor can tune to it, and budget a few hours for the first full pass.

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• Best Web Search API

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