Category: AI Search/Research
No longer a consumer search engine. Now a search API.
You.com has changed what it sells. It began as a consumer search engine and AI chat product positioned against Google and ChatGPT, and that is still how most directories describe it. It is now an API and infrastructure business: search and inference for AI applications. The product line covers web search, page contents retrieval, an answer endpoint, research endpoints at several depths from a quick lookup through to exhaustive multi-step investigation, a finance research endpoint, and an inference router across models. Pricing is per thousand calls rather than per seat, with research tiers priced according to depth. There is a first-party MCP server with OAuth covering six tools, available as a hosted endpoint and an npm package, and listed in the public MCP registry. The free tier gives a hundred web search queries a day through MCP with no card required.
Read the first line before anything else, because this is the correction that matters: the consumer search and chat product is effectively gone, and anyone still listing You.com as a ChatGPT alternative is now out of date. What remains is a credible search infrastructure business, and for this audience it is genuinely interesting. A hundred free web search queries a day through MCP, with no card, is a real offer and the simplest way to give an agent reliable web search. The research endpoints priced by depth are a sensible model, letting you pay for a quick lookup or an exhaustive investigation as the task demands. It is well funded following a large round in 2025. The limitations are straightforward. There are no seats and no interface, so this is for building with rather than using. Models are entirely US-hosted with no UK entity, no GBP pricing and no UK representative we could verify. And if you were a consumer user, the reports of lost chat histories during the transition are worth knowing about.
Best for: Developers and technical marketers building search or research into their own tools and agents, rather than anyone looking for a consumer search engine.
Pricing: Pay per call, free tier of 100 queries a day (Freemium)
Rating: 4/5