You.com

You.com is no longer a search box for people. The front page today reads “The Leading Web Search APIs for AI”, and the navigation sells Web Search, Contents, Answer, Research, Run and Visual JSON: you sign up for credits, not for a chat tab. The shape is a free developer tier at 100 queries a day with $100 in trial credits, then metered calls — $5.00 per 1,000 Web Search calls, $1.00 per 1,000 pages through Contents, $12.00 per 1,000 Research calls — with “Zero Data Retention” and SOC 2 stated on the same page. What it is genuinely good at is one job: handing your agent or your product fresh, citable web results with clean extracted text attached.

Where it loses is the thing this directory filed it under. There is no consumer assistant marketed from the homepage any more, no model picker up top, and the headline claim — a Highlights mode scoring 95.17% on SimpleQA while costing “35% cheaper than Claude’s built-in web search” — is the vendor’s own benchmark, so treat it as marketing until you reproduce it on your query mix. A buyer should also check how a per-1,000-call rate behaves once you cache, retry and fan out sub-queries, whether zero data retention is contractual or merely a plan feature, and what the 100-query ceiling means for staging traffic. If you are building retrieval into agents, this is a serious infrastructure vendor worth a bake-off against the big search APIs. If you wanted a chat product that cites its sources, this is no longer that product.