Microsoft retired the Bing Search API in August 2025, and if you were one of the teams quietly depending on it, you probably went shopping for a replacement not long after. That gap is a big part of why "search built for agents" grew into its own category over the past year. Here's what's actually worth using, what each one is built for, and how to connect them without hand-rolling six separate integrations.

Brave Search API

An independent search index you query directly, built on Brave's own crawl rather than licensed results.

• Runs on its own index, not a reseller of Google or Bing results

• Fastest response times in third-party agent benchmarks this year, with latency well under a second

• LLM Context API returns pre-parsed content chunks instead of raw snippets

• Removed its free query tier in February 2026, so new accounts start on metered billing with a small monthly credit

• Requires attribution in the product UI on every plan, including paid tiers

Tavily

A search and extraction API built specifically for agent workflows, returning structured, citation-ready output instead of raw links.

• Native output format designed for RAG pipelines and agent frameworks

• Integrates directly with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and similar orchestration tools

• Offers tiered search depth, from a fast basic pass to a deeper research mode

• Ships an official MCP server for direct agent connection

• Now operates under Nebius after a February 2026 acquisition, though it continues running under its own brand and product

Exa

A neural search engine that indexes meaning rather than keywords, built for finding conceptually related content even when your exact terms don't match.

• Semantic retrieval finds relevant pages that don't contain the literal query terms

• Strong fit for research and academic-style retrieval tasks

• Find-similar endpoint surfaces related pages starting from a single seed URL

• Returns clean, pre-parsed content rather than raw HTML

• Official MCP server available for direct agent integration

Firecrawl

A combined search, scrape, and crawl API aimed at agents that need more than a single search call to complete a task.

• Bundles search with scraping and crawling in one API surface

• Map and extract endpoints handle structured data pulls beyond basic search

• Reduces the need to stitch together separate search and scraping vendors

• Official MCP server covers the full search-plus-scrape workflow

• Works well for coding agents that need to pull docs and examples in sequence

MCP360

A tool that connects your agent to search providers and other services through a single MCP connection, instead of one connection per vendor.

• Routes search requests to whichever provider is registered behind it, including Brave, Tavily, Exa, and others

• Removes the need to hold a separate MCP connection open for each search vendor

• Lets your agent route different query types to different search engines from one endpoint

• Turns switching or adding a search provider into a configuration change rather than a new setup

• Useful once your project needs more than one search provider, such as Exa for depth and Brave for speed on the same agent

SerpAPI and Serper

Traditional SERP wrappers that return structured results from Google and other engines, built for teams that need exact search-engine parity rather than an AI-native format.

• Access to 40+ search engines through a single API, including Maps and Flights

• Serper offers a lower-cost path to Google results for high-volume, budget-sensitive use

• Structured JSON output mirrors what a real search results page contains

• Useful when your agent needs SERP features an AI-native API doesn't expose

• Reliable fallback when independent-index results aren't a requirement

Perplexity Sonar API

An answer-generation API that returns a synthesized response with citations rather than a list of results for your agent to parse.

• Produces a ready-to-display answer instead of raw search data

• Citations are attached directly to the generated response

• Removes the summarization step your agent would otherwise have to do itself

• Well suited to user-facing features where the agent's answer needs a paper trail

• Less useful when your agent needs raw source material to reason over on its own

Where this is headed

Search APIs have already consolidated around MCP faster than most infrastructure categories do, and that trend isn't slowing down. The question worth asking is no longer whether a vendor has an MCP server, because most of them do now. It's what your agent can do once it's connected. That means chaining search with scraping in one call, routing between providers based on query type, and falling back automatically when one index comes up short.

The teams that win this year aren't the ones betting on a single "best" search API. They're the ones building agents that can switch providers without a rewrite, because the vendor that's fastest and cheapest today won't be the one that's fastest and cheapest in six months. Build for that reality now, and you won't be the one migrating in a panic the next time a provider changes its pricing overnight.