You.com API
Real-time web search and RAG APIs for developers, with MCP integrations.
About
You.com's developer platform exposes five APIs (Search, News, RAG, Contents, and more) for plugging real-time web data into LLMs and agents, with MCP/framework integrations documented. Pricing: $100 starter credits; Search $5/1,000 calls, Contents $1/1,000 pages; other APIs separately rated.
Smaller ecosystem than Perplexity's, but the RAG endpoint and rights to use data for AI inference/citations are differentiators for builders. Docs at docs.you.com.
What it can do
- Real-time web and news search APIs
- RAG endpoint for LLM grounding
- Contents API for page extraction
- MCP and framework integrations
- Rights to use data for AI inference and citations
Setup
- Sign up at you.com and get an API key (starter credits included).
- Read the quickstart at docs.you.com.
- Call the Search API (
$5/1k calls) or Contents API ($1/1k pages). - Wire into your RAG pipeline or expose via MCP.
Prerequisites
You.com account with API key; starter credits available.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (metrics tier). Legitimate developer API with documented pricing and MCP integrations, but thinner independent coverage and a smaller ecosystem than the leaders. Provider-tier adoption estimate. Honest metrics-tier placement for a solid second-tier search API.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 5.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.5/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · provider-tier estimate — thinner evidence (no public adoption metric)
- · smaller than Perplexity; docs + MCP integrations verified — provider-tier estimate
- · no release date — neutral maintenance score
- · manual review: 5 APIs, $100 starter credits per docs; thinner independent coverage; license: closed API (You.com)
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.