DeepSeek has opened its in-house web search engine to outside developers, launching Search and Fetch as standalone tools on its API platform. Both are raw JSON endpoints that authenticate with the same keys as the rest of the DeepSeek API, and they are aimed at agent and retrieval-augmented generation applications that need live web content without bolting on a third-party search provider.
Search takes a query of up to 128 characters and returns between 1 and 50 structured results, 10 by default. It supports operators such as site: and -site: to include or exclude domains, quoted phrases, lang: for language restriction, and after: and before: to bound publication dates. Fetch takes a single HTTP or HTTPS URL and returns the page title plus the body as Markdown. DeepSeek says the engine indexes hundreds of billions of pages and filters SEO spam, geo manipulation and low-quality AI-generated content.
Pricing is per request rather than per token or per result: USD 0.75 per 1,000 successful calls on each endpoint, capped at 5 queries per second per account. Only calls that return HTTP 200 with content are billed, so failed requests, empty searches and timeouts are free. Search and Fetch calls made through server-side tools in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are free for DeepSeek API users until billing starts on October 31, 2026.