Tavily

Tavily made its name as “the search API for LLMs” by solving the right problem: models don't want links, they want clean, ranked, retrieval-ready text. One call returns the top pages already scraped, chunked and filtered — and an optional answer mode even synthesizes a response, letting developers upgrade from search to RAG without touching a scraping stack.

It became the default web tool across LangChain, LlamaIndex and friends precisely because it is boring in the best way: predictable JSON, sensible filters (restrict to your own domains), and pricing that starts free. Compared with Exa's semantic approach, Tavily is more of a classic ranked search tuned for machines — often the more predictable choice for factual RAG. For any assistant that needs “look it up online”, Tavily is the shortest integration path.