Keenable.ai positions itself as search infrastructure for AI agents: a 100B+ document index, Search/Fetch APIs, MCP/CLI entry points, 100K free monthly requests, and keyless public endpoints. It is worth tracking, but the 100B+ index, latency, and quality claims are still mostly company-provided; NEEDLE is open, but needs external reruns and human review.
TinyFish provides four web APIs for AI agents: Search, Fetch, Agent, and Browser. Search and Fetch are permanently priced at $0 with no credit card requirement, making them a practical default layer for RAG and document retrieval.
Keenable came out of stealth with a $26M seed round led by Accel, with Conviction Partners participating. The bet isn't 'search that beats Google' — it's that AI agents query the web in a fundamentally different pattern than humans do, and need retrieval infrastructure designed from scratch around that.
Brave Search API exposes five endpoint families—Web, News, Images, Videos, and LLM Context—backed by Brave's own Web index and ranking models. Its core search is not merely a Google SERP wrapper.
SerpAPI primarily manages search-results-page retrieval and parsing: select an engine, receive a structured SERP, then handle location, pagination, asynchronous polling, and validation in your application.
Serper is a third-party Google SERP API: one POST request returns structured JSON such as organic, knowledgeGraph, and peopleAlsoAsk, but production code still needs optional-field validation, URL checks, retries, and source verification.
Free access is not one model: recurring allowances, balance top-ups, rate-limited access, one-time credits, and self-hosting have different steady-state costs.
Linkup separates search depth from response shape: start most agent queries with standard + searchResults, move to deep only for multi-step browsing, and treat the monthly $20 as a balance refill rather than a new $20 grant.
Tavily exposes Search, Extract, Map, and Crawl through one web API for agents. The free plan includes 1,000 credits per month; basic, fast, and ultra-fast Search cost 1 credit each, while advanced costs 2.