Web search API
Connect your AI to the web at scale
One API call plugs your product into a 100B+ page index that powers Ahrefs. Results arrive with highlights, ready for your agent or RAG pipeline.
A web search API built on the crawl index that already powers Ahrefs’ SEO tools
First-party data, end to end
Crawler, index, and ranking are all operated by Ahrefs. No second-hand data, no upstream provider that can change terms or rate limits under you.
8 billion pages recrawled daily
The same crawl cadence Ahrefs’ SEO tools depend on. You can even filter results by crawl date to require recently fetched pages.
15 years of crawler uptime
Ahrefs has kept AhrefsBot running non-stop since 2010. Yep inherits that operational experience. This isn’t infrastructure stood up last quarter.
The crawl begins
AhrefsBot starts indexing the web, growing into one of its most active crawlers.
Yep announced
Ahrefs reveals plans for an independent search engine on its own index.
The landscape shifts
LLMs and AI Overviews change how people find information.
Search API ships
Developer-first search for agents and RAG in the AI era.
See what one request gets you
One endpoint, transparent controls, and a cost readout in every response, so you always know what you’re paying before your invoice does.
Request
curl -X POST "https://platform.yep.com/api/search" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $YEP_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "query": "saratoga spring water", "type": "highlights", "limit": 10, "language": ["en"], "location": "US", "content_type": "Article", "start_published_date": "2026-01-01" }'
AI-ready excerpts, no extra fee
Get query-relevant text highlights from page content alongside the title, URL, and description, at no extra cost.
180+ languages, per-country ranking
Filter by ISO language codes and steer ranking toward one country’s sites and sources.
11 content types, 111 subtypes
Ask for only articles, videos, documents, listings, forums, and more, from recipes to research papers.
Domain allow & block lists
Restrict results to trusted sources or exclude domains you never want your agent to cite.
Date-range control
Filter by when a page was published, or by when AhrefsBot last crawled it, so you can demand fresh data.
Team-ready key management
Programmatically provision, cap, disable, and revoke API keys, with per-key rate limits for each service or teammate.
Standard limits on every plan. Need more throughput? Enterprise options →
Plug Yep into your stack to power AI agents, RAG pipelines, and search applications
Real-time web grounding
Give your agent live access to billions of pages instead of a frozen training set, with highlights it can quote directly.
Fresh context, on demand
Pull query-relevant excerpts straight into retrieval. No scraping step, no separate content-extraction endpoint to pay for.
Search at scale
Build your own search experience on a 100B+ page index, with language, country, and content-type filters built in.
Plug Yep into your stack to power AI agents, RAG pipelines, and search applications
Real-time web grounding
Give your agent live access to billions of pages instead of a frozen training set, with highlights it can quote directly.
Fresh context, on demand
Pull query-relevant excerpts straight into retrieval. No scraping step, no separate content-extraction endpoint to pay for.
Search at scale
Build your own search experience on a 100B+ page index, with language, country, and content-type filters built in.
Yep vs. other search APIs
| Other search APIs | |
Index | Runs on AhrefsBot, one of the web’s most active crawlers, with 100B+ pages indexed since 2010 | Often built on a smaller purpose-built crawl or licensed data, without an established index |
Freshness | 8 billion pages recrawled daily, plus a crawl-date filter to require recently fetched pages | Recrawl frequency varies by provider and plan, and is rarely queryable |
Pricing | From $4 per 1,000 requests with up to 20 results each; only returned results are charged | Typically $7 to $8 per 1,000 requests for AI-optimized tiers |
Content for AI | Query-relevant highlights included at no extra cost | Extracted content is often a separate paid endpoint |
Cost visibility | Every response returns its exact cost and your balance before and after | Usage is usually visible only in a dashboard, after the fact |
Frequently asked questions
What is a web search API?
A web search API lets your application or AI agent query the web programmatically and get back ranked, relevant results, instead of you building and maintaining your own crawler and index.Is there a free web search API?
Yes. Yep gives every new account 1,000 free API requests with no credit card required. That’s enough to benchmark result quality on your own real queries before you pay anything. After that, pricing is pay-as-you-go from $4 per 1,000 requests with no subscription or monthly minimum.What is the best search API for RAG and AI agents?
The things that matter most for RAG and agent workloads are index ownership (is the provider reselling someone else’s data?), crawl freshness, whether extracted content costs extra, and per-call price. Yep is built around exactly these: its own 100B+ page index crawled by AhrefsBot with 8 billion pages refreshed daily, query-relevant highlights included in every response at no extra cost, and filters for language, country, content type, domains, and publish or crawl dates so you control what your agent retrieves.How much does the Yep Search API cost?
Two pay-as-you-go tiers: Balanced at $4 per 1,000 requests, and Advanced at $8 per 1,000 for higher quality results. Both include up to 20 results per request; each additional result costs $1 per 1,000, only returned results are charged, and highlights are included at no extra cost. You start with 1,000 free requests and no credit card. Enterprise plans add up to 1,000 results per search, custom rate limits, and volume discounts.What does each search result include?
A basic search returns the URL, meta title, and meta description for each result. A highlights search additionally returns query-relevant text excerpts from the page content, ready to feed straight into a model, at no extra cost.How do I know what I’m spending?
Every API response includes an api_cost object with the exact cost of that call and a balance object showing your account balance before and after. If your balance runs out you get a clear 402 error rather than surprise charges. There’s no subscription to forget about.What are the rate limits?
Every API key allows 60 requests per minute, 3,600 per hour, and 86,400 per day. Responses include rate-limit headers so your client can back off gracefully. If you need higher throughput, Enterprise plans offer custom limits.Can my team manage multiple API keys?
Yes. Org admins can create, label, disable, and revoke keys, and set tighter per-key rate limits, either in the dashboard or programmatically through the management keys API, which is handy for provisioning one key per service or environment.