What is You.com?
You.com is an AI infrastructure service that combines real-time web data APIs with model inference for developers and enterprise teams. You.com supports applications that need search results, extracted page content, cited answers, or research across multiple sources. The service also provides an Inference Router for running leading open-weight models through a shared API.
You.com distinguishes between retrieving information and doing the reasoning. The Web Search API returns sources for an application to process, while the Answer API and Research API produce answers. This separation lets teams choose how much search, synthesis, and research logic they want to build themselves.
What You.com can do
You.com provides separate endpoints for search, extraction, answers, research, and inference. The web data APIs use the same real-time index, while the Inference Router connects model workloads to built-in search. Developers can select an endpoint according to whether their application needs raw sources, parsed pages, a written answer, or deeper investigation.
- You.com retrieves real-time web and news results.
- You.com extracts clean Markdown or HTML from supplied URLs.
- You.com generates cited answers with the sources used.
- You.com plans research, searches repeatedly, reads pages, and cross-references information.
- You.com runs models from providers including Kimi, Muse, DeepSeek, and GLM.
- You.com reroutes inference requests automatically when a provider becomes unavailable.
How You.com works
You.com offers API access, SDKs, MCP configuration documentation, and an interactive demo. Developers can obtain an API key for endpoint access or use the free Web Search MCP server without an account. The Web Search example uses the youdotcom Python package to submit a query and read result titles, URLs, and snippets.
You.com accepts known URLs through the Contents API when extraction is needed without search. The Research API exposes a research_effort parameter to adjust depth and cost. For model workloads, the Inference Router uses an OpenAI-compatible API and combines provider routing with server-side web search, avoiding a separate search integration.
Who You.com is for
You.com serves developers building AI applications and agents, as well as enterprise teams running production workloads. Search endpoints suit teams that want to control their own reasoning, while answer and research endpoints suit applications that need synthesis supplied by the service. Enterprise options address higher-volume usage, security review, operational visibility, and support.
- You.com supports adding live web search to an agent.
- You.com supports parsing pages when the relevant URLs are already known.
- You.com supports answering questions with cited web sources.
- You.com supports researching complex questions across several sources.
You.com pricing and plans
You.com offers free Web Search access through MCP with up to 100 queries a day and no API key, account, or credit card. Production access is pay as you go, with no minimums, seats, or platform fee. Standard Web Search and Answer API pricing is $5 /1k calls, while Contents API pricing is $1 /1k Pages.
You.com prices inference according to the selected model and research according to the selected effort level. Research Lite costs $12 /1k calls, and Research Standard costs $50 /1k calls. Enterprise arrangements use custom pricing and can include custom QPS, dedicated capacity, Zero Data Retention, and SLA-backed support.
You.com strengths and limitations
You.com combines web retrieval, research, and inference access with production controls such as daily usage visibility and per-key spend caps. The Inference Router includes automatic failover and a 99.9% uptime SLA. You.com also lists SOC 2 certification, DPA readiness, and dedicated enterprise engineering support for onboarding, optimization, and issue resolution.
- You.com limits free MCP search to 100 queries a day.
- You.com charges for production endpoints, with inference costs varying by model.
- You.com Research Lite does not provide structured output.
You.com FAQ
What is You.com?
You.com is a search and inference infrastructure service for AI applications. You.com provides APIs for real-time web search, page extraction, cited answers, multi-step research, and model inference, serving developers and enterprise teams that need web data or production model access.
Is You.com free?
You.com offers free Web Search API access through MCP for up to 100 queries a day, without an API key, account, or credit card. You.com also offers paid, pay-as-you-go production endpoints and custom enterprise arrangements.
How much do You.com APIs cost?
You.com charges $5 /1k calls for Standard Web Search and the Answer API, and $1 /1k Pages for the Contents API. You.com prices inference by model and research by effort level, with custom pricing for enterprise teams.
What is the difference between You.com Web Search and Research APIs?
You.com Web Search API returns sources for an application to reason over, while the Research API performs multi-step research and produces an answer. You.com Research API plans searches, reads full pages, and cross-references information, with a research_effort parameter controlling cost and depth.
Does You.com support MCP and OpenAI-compatible APIs?
You.com supports MCP for web search and offers an OpenAI-compatible API through the Inference Router. You.com combines access to leading open-weight models, automatic provider failover, and built-in web search so developers can run workloads without managing multiple model providers.
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