Cloud & Architecture · Paid

DeepSeek Search & Fetch API

DeepSeek Search & Fetch API is a pair of web tools from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab behind the DeepSeek V4 model family. Search returns ranked web results for a query, and Fetch returns the readable content of a single web page as Markdown. Both run on DeepSeek's in-house search engine, which the company says serves hundreds of millions of requests a day. DeepSeek opened both endpoints to all developers on October 17, 2026. The two endpoints are POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search and POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/fetch, and they use the same API key as DeepSeek's chat models. A Search request takes a query of 1 to 128 characters and an optional count of 1 to 50 results (10 by default). It also accepts the original user question, a localization hint and a flag to include full page content. Queries support operators such as site:, -site:, an exact "phrase", lang:, after: and before:. Each result carries a title, URL, snippet, a 600 to 800 character summary, the site name, a date, a rerank score from 0 to 3 (DeepSeek treats 1.5 and above as high quality) and an authority score from 0 to 4. Fetch accepts a URL of up to 8,192 characters and returns the page title and its content in Markdown. Pricing is $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests for Search and the same for Fetch, as listed in DeepSeek's documentation. Only requests that return HTTP 200 with non-empty results or page content are billed, so failures, empty results and timeouts are free, and the count parameter does not change the price. The default rate limits are 100 queries per second for Search and 25 per second for Fetch per account, across all keys, and Fetch also applies a per-domain limit. A 402 error means the account balance is too low, and 404 from Fetch means no usable content was found. The same tools also run server-side inside DeepSeek's agent integrations, including DeepSeek Harness and its documented setups for Claude Code and Codex. Billing for those server-side calls began on November 1, 2026. On the Artificial Analysis Search Index, DeepSeek Search (summary mode) scored 69 when Artificial Analysis added it on October 22, 2026, with 75 F1 on DeepSearchQA, 63% on BrowseComp and 70% on AA-Omniscience. Artificial Analysis described it as the lowest-priced paid Search API on its board at the time. Index scores depend on the agent harness and answer model used, so check the live leaderboard before relying on them.