2 min readFreemium

Tavily

Tavily is a search and extraction API that gives AI agents and LLM apps real-time, citation-ready web results for developers.

// at a glance

Is Tavily free?
Freemium. Partly. Tavily has a free plan, with paid plans for more features or usage.
Category
#Web Development
Website
tavily.com ↗
Tavily logo

What is Tavily?

Tavily is a web search and extraction API built for AI agents and LLM applications, returning real-time, cleaned results with sources that models can cite. It says more than 3 million developers use it, and it integrates with popular agent frameworks such as LangChain. In February 2026 the AI cloud company Nebius agreed to acquire Tavily, and Tavily continues to operate under its own brand.

Tavily differs from a general search API because results are prepared for language models: instead of raw links, it returns relevant snippets and clean page content sized for a context window. Five endpoints cover the main jobs: Search for fast results, Extract for clean content from given URLs, Crawl for content across a whole site, Map for discovering a site's URLs and Research for an agent that runs in-depth web research. Developers use Tavily to ground chatbots in current information, power research agents, build retrieval pipelines and add web access to internal tools.

Main Features

  • Search the web in real time with results formatted for LLMs.
  • Extract clean, structured content from specific URLs.
  • Crawl an entire website and return its content.
  • Map all URLs on a site for discovery.
  • Run in-depth web research with the Research agent endpoint.
  • Return sources with each result for citations.
  • Integrate with agent frameworks such as LangChain.

How to Get Started with Tavily

  1. Sign up at tavily.com to get an API key with 1,000 free monthly credits.
  2. Install the Tavily SDK for Python or JavaScript, or use the REST API.
  3. Call the Search endpoint with a query and read the results.
  4. Add Tavily as a tool in your agent framework.
  5. Move to pay-as-you-go or a plan when you need more credits.

Tavily Pricing

The free Researcher plan includes 1,000 API credits per month with no credit card. Pay As You Go costs $0.008 per credit, and Project plans are monthly subscriptions with more credits and higher rate limits. Enterprise pricing is custom, and students can use the service for free.

Who Should Use It?

  • Developers building AI agents that need current web data.
  • Teams grounding chatbots in up-to-date sources.
  • Researchers automating literature and market research.
  • Startups adding web search to LLM products.
  • Data teams crawling and extracting site content.

Tavily Alternatives

  • Browserbase: Headless browsers for agents that need to interact with sites.
  • Perplexity AI: Answer engine for people rather than an API for agents.
  • OpenRouter: Model routing API often paired with a search tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tavily free?

Yes, Tavily includes 1,000 free API credits per month with no credit card. After that, pay-as-you-go costs $0.008 per credit.

What is Tavily used for?

Tavily is used to give AI agents and LLM apps access to real-time web search and content. Developers use it for research agents and grounded chatbots.

Who owns Tavily?

Nebius agreed to acquire Tavily in February 2026. Tavily continues to operate under its own brand.

Does Tavily work with LangChain?

Yes, Tavily integrates with LangChain and other agent frameworks. You can add it as a search tool in a few lines of code.

Try Tavily