What is a web search API?
A web search API is a programmatic interface for querying a search index and receiving structured results in JSON. It abstracts the crawling, indexing, and ranking infrastructure so applications can submit a query string and receive back ranked URLs, titles, and snippets without parsing HTML or building a crawler. For AI agents, a web search API acts as the discovery layer: the agent identifies what information it needs, issues a query, and uses the ranked results to decide which pages to read next. The distinction from a generic search API is scope: a web search API queries the public web index, while a search API may cover any corpus.
| Factor | Build your own crawler | Web search API | Google Custom Search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Weeks of infrastructure | Minutes | Minutes |
| Coverage | Only what you crawl | Broad, pre-indexed web | Configurable scope |
| Maintenance | Continuous | Managed by provider | Managed by provider |
| Result format | Raw HTML | Structured JSON | Structured JSON |
| Best for | Controlled, focused domains | Open-ended web discovery | Google-specific results |
Use a web search API when your application needs to discover pages before reading them, when coverage needs to span many domains, or when real-time web search for LLMs is required to answer questions beyond a model's training cutoff. Building a custom crawler makes sense only when the target is a small, fixed set of known sites where you need full control over crawl frequency and depth.
Firecrawl's Search API returns structured results from a high-quality web index and pairs directly with the Scrape API: search finds the relevant URLs, scrape extracts their full content in clean Markdown, and the combination gives agents the full text they need to reason over.
data from the web