You.com

You.com is a web search API platform purpose-built for AI agents and LLMs, offering a Search API, Contents API, Research API, and Finance Research API for real-time web intelligence. Founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, former Salesforce Chief Scientist, the company pivoted from consumer AI search to an API-first platform targeting AI agent developers, enterprise AI teams, and data pipeline operators. It positions as one of the leading web search APIs for AI, alongside competitors Tavily and Exa AI in the AI search infrastructure category. You.com publishes an official MCP server (documented at you.com/docs/build-with-agents/mcp-server) that lets any MCP-compatible AI client access search, contents, and research capabilities directly. A unified Python SDK provides programmatic access across all API endpoints. The Search API returns up to 100 URLs per call with LLM-ready snippets, rich metadata, and country/language targeting filters, and the News endpoint is included at no extra cost. Notable gap: fewer documented named framework integrations than Tavily (12+, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Databricks, and LangChain) or Exa AI (LangChain, LlamaIndex, and OpenAI named explicitly). Pricing is usage-based with a $100 free credit for evaluation and no minimums. The Search API costs $5 per 1,000 calls (1 to 100 results per call), and the Contents API costs $1 per 1,000 pages for full page text, summaries, and metadata. The Research API provides multi-source synthesis at per-request pricing that is not published on the site and requires contacting You.com, and the Finance Research API (scoring 87.29% on FinSearchComp) serves financial research use cases. Volume discounts apply as usage scales, and annual commitments offer deeper discounts. All plans include SOC 2 certification and zero model training on customer data. You.com is not designed for consumer web search or non-developer use cases. Perplexity AI ($17/mo) provides a consumer research interface. ChatGPT Deep Research ($20/mo) handles broad autonomous research for end users. Tavily (free tier, $0.008/credit, 2M+ developers, acquired by Nebius for $275M) has a larger developer ecosystem and more documented framework integrations. Exa AI (free tier, $7/1K requests, $361M raised at a $2.2B valuation) offers a proprietary search index covering 500B+ URLs. For traditional web search without agent optimization, Google and Bing APIs remain available. The Trustpilot profile (50 reviews at 2.1) reflects consumer product complaints from the pivot period rather than current API product quality. You.com launched the Finance Research API, scoring 87.29% on the FinSearchComp benchmark, as a specialized financial research capability. SOC 2 certification and a zero-model-training policy are confirmed on the pricing page. The official MCP server is published in the developer docs and the Resources section. As of Q3 2026, G2 shows 19 reviews at 4.4/5 under the AI Agents for Business Operations category (claimed by You.com). The Startup Grant Program provides credits for early-stage companies. Search ($5/1K) and Contents ($1/1K) rates are fully transparent. The pivot from consumer search to API-first is complete, with the homepage and all product pages oriented entirely around developer and enterprise API use cases.