DeepSeek just sparked an AI search price war
DeepSeek just sparked an AI search price war
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.
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.
Go deeper: DeepSeek made its name with cheap AI models. Now it’s undercutting search API rivals, too.
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