What is a search API?

A search API is a programmatic interface that accepts a text query and returns ranked, structured results from an index without rendering a browser page. The caller sends a query over HTTP and receives JSON with titles, URLs, snippets, and metadata for each result. The index behind the API may cover the full web, a specific domain, an internal document store, or a vertical corpus. For AI agents and automated pipelines, a search API provides the discovery step: the system identifies what it needs to find, queries the API, and uses the structured response to decide which URLs to visit or which content to extract next. A web search API is the most common variant, backed by a broad public web index.

Use a general web search API when the target information could be on any site and you need broad coverage. Use a domain-specific API when working within a known corpus such as scientific literature or e-commerce products. Use an in-site search API when navigating a specific site's own content. For agentic search workflows that issue multiple adaptive queries, a general web search API is typically the right starting point.

Firecrawl's Search API provides structured results from a broad web index with a single API call. Combine it with the Scrape API to go from query to full page content in two steps, without managing crawl infrastructure or index maintenance.