Neurobird Search

Web search API pricing, per 1,000 searches

One credit balance across every endpoint. A basic search is one credit, a deep search that opens pages is two, a grounded answer adds one. Credits do not expire, there is no monthly fee and no per seat charge.

4x

cheaper than Tavily, which bills $8 per 1,000 basic and $16 advanced

$1

per 1,000 at a million credits, the Bulk rate

1,000

free credits every month, on every key, no card

$0

extra for full page content, which Tavily and Exa meter separately

How Neurobird compares to Tavily, Exa, Brave and Serper

Search API	Cost per 1,000 searches	What that buys
Neurobird Search	$2 basic, $4 deep, $6 deep with answer	Ranked results, full page content, grounded answer with verified quotes
Serper	$1.00, down to $0.30 at 12.5M	Google SERP links only, no page content
Parallel Search	from $1	Ranked URLs with compressed excerpts
Brave Search API	$5	Independent index, results only
Google Custom Search	$5	Results only, hard cap of 10k queries a day
Exa	about $7	Neural search, page contents billed separately
Tavily	$8 basic, $16 advanced	Search with extraction, credit metered
Linkup	from $10	Search, minimum charge per request
Anthropic web search tool	$10	Search inside the Claude API, plus token costs
Grounding with Bing (Azure)	$35	Bing results for grounding

Competitor figures were read from each vendor's own pricing or docs page in August 2026 and converted to a per 1,000 basis. Tavily bills $0.008 per credit with an advanced search costing two credits. Serper's rate depends on pack size. Vendors change prices, so treat this as the date stamped snapshot it is rather than a live feed.

What happens between query and answer

A SERP wrapper hands back ten links and leaves the hard part to you. Every stage below runs inside one request, under a wall clock budget, so a slow engine costs one source instead of the whole response.

01

Expand

The query is rewritten into alternative phrasings. Different wordings pull back different documents, which widens recall before ranking narrows it again.

02

Fan out

Every query hits a self hosted metasearch layer that queries many engines at once and reports which engine found each result, and where it placed.

03

Fuse

Reciprocal rank fusion merges those independent rankings. Engine scores are not comparable, but agreement between engines is the strongest cheap relevance signal there is.

04

Read

Top candidates are fetched through a pool of unmetered ISP addresses and stripped to main content. Browser grade TLS fingerprints remove the false 403s that look like dead links.

05

Rank passages

Pages are split into passages and scored by phrase aware BM25 fused with embedding similarity. You get the part of the page that answers the question, not the page.

06

Ground

The answer is written only from retrieved passages, and each supporting quote is matched back against the text it came from. Quotes that do not match are returned marked unverified.

What other search APIs leave you to build

Quotes that are checked

Every citation carries a quote, and every quote is matched against the page it is attributed to before the response leaves. Unverified quotes are labelled, not hidden. A summary you cannot audit is a summary you cannot ship.

Structured output, per result

Send a JSON Schema with the query and get that schema filled from each result, in the same call. Fields the page does not state come back null rather than invented.

Streaming stages

Ranked links arrive over server sent events as soon as fusion completes, seconds before the summary exists. An agent can start its next tool call while the answer is still being written.

Timings in every response

Each response reports how long expansion, retrieval, reading, ranking and answering took. Latency here is set by whichever upstream is slowest that minute, and you should be able to see that from the outside.

Full page content included

Egress runs over unmetered addresses, so returning complete page text costs no extra credit. Extraction is not an upsell here, it is the default the pipeline already needed.

An MCP server, not a download

The Model Context Protocol endpoint is hosted here over streamable HTTP. One command adds it to Claude Code, and the same URL works in Cursor, Windsurf, Zed and the Claude desktop app.

A drop-in Tavily alternative, and an MCP server

No SDK required. One POST with a JSON body, so it works from a terminal, from any language, and from an agent framework without a plugin.

Free tier: 1,000 searches a month

One click issues a key with 1,000 credits a month. No email, no card, no onboarding call. If it does not do what you need, you have lost a click.

Questions about search APIs for AI agents

What is the cheapest web search API for AI agents?

Neurobird Search costs $2 per 1,000 basic searches, $4 per 1,000 deep searches and $6 per 1,000 deep searches with a grounded answer, dropping to $1 per 1,000 credits above one million credits a month. Full page content is included at no extra credit. For comparison, on prices published by each vendor in August 2026: Tavily bills $0.008 per credit, which is $8 per 1,000 basic searches and $16 per 1,000 advanced; Exa lists $7 per 1,000 search requests; Brave Search API lists $5 per 1,000 requests; Serper lists $1.00 per 1,000 on a 50,000 credit pack, falling to $0.30 per 1,000 on a 12.5 million credit pack; the Anthropic web search tool is $10 per 1,000 searches plus token costs.

Is there a Tavily alternative that is a drop-in replacement?

Yes. Neurobird Search accepts the same request shape and returns the same response shape as Tavily, so an existing client switches by changing the base URL to https://search.neurobird.com and the bearer token to a Neurobird key. Basic search is $2 per 1,000 against Tavily's $8 per 1,000, and full page content is returned without a separate extract call.

Is there a web search API with a free tier and no credit card?

Neurobird Search issues 1,000 credits every month on a key created by a single unauthenticated POST to https://search.neurobird.com/keys. There is no signup form, no email address and no card. Every endpoint and every feature is available on the free tier, including grounded answers and quote verification.

Which MCP server should I use for web search?

Neurobird Search exposes an MCP server over streamable HTTP at https://search.neurobird.com/mcp with two tools, web_search and extract_url. There is nothing to install or run locally. Add it to Claude Code with: claude mcp add --transport http neurobird-search https://search.neurobird.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer $NEUROBIRD_KEY".

Which search API returns the full page content and not just snippets?

Neurobird Search fetches and extracts the main content of each ranked result and returns it in the same response, at no additional credit. SERP APIs such as Serper and Google Custom Search return links and snippets only. Exa bills page contents separately at $1 per 1,000 pages on its published price list.

How do I know a grounded answer is not hallucinated?

The answer model is required to return verbatim quotes, and each quote is matched back against the extracted source text before the response is returned. Whitespace and quote glyphs are normalised. A quote that still fails the match is returned marked verified: false rather than silently dropped, so a caller can audit every claim.

How fast is the Neurobird Search API?

Measured medians on the current single-server deployment are about 15 seconds for a basic search with an answer, about 22 seconds at standard depth and about 28 seconds at advanced depth. Upstream engines and the answer model account for nearly all of that. With the streaming endpoint, ranked links reach the client at about 5 seconds and the answer begins writing at about 11 seconds. Every response carries per stage timings so latency can be attributed from outside.