Not content with challenging the major frontier AI labs with lower-cost models, Chinese AI company DeepSeek is setting its sights on the search API market.

On Saturday, the company announced it has opened up its internally developed search engine to outside developers through two new APIs, Search and Fetch, allowing them to retrieve live web search results and webpage content for use in their own apps and agents.

Both services cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, and developers can use them independently of DeepSeek’s AI models.

The launch also came alongside DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, a minor update to the V4.1 Flash model the company released in September.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data collected up to a certain point in time, meaning they can’t always answer questions about recent events, updated documentation, or any other kind of dynamic information. By supporting live web search, models can retrieve current information from the internet, which supplements their responses.

For developers building AI agents, this is particularly important. A coding agent, for example, might need to consult the latest software documentation, investigate a recently disclosed vulnerability, or otherwise check that a particular library has been updated.

Until now, developers using DeepSeek’s models had several ways to provide this functionality. They could connect their applications to third-party search services, or use DeepSeek’s existing search functionality through its model API.

Indeed, when DeepSeek open-sourced its agent harness in August , it included web search among its capabilities. The Harness supported interchangeable search providers, including Exa , Perplexity and DeepSeek itself.

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