Quickstart

You.com gives you real-time web intelligence through five APIs: Web Search, Answer, Contents, Research, and Finance Research. Two ways to get started — write code, or connect your agent.

The five APIs:

• Web Search API — real-time web and news results as LLM-ready JSON
• Answer API — a cited, synthesized answer from a single query
• Contents API — clean Markdown or HTML from URLs you specify
• Research API — multi-step, cited answers to complex questions
• Finance Research API — cited answers from a finance-optimized index

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from youdotcom import You
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with You() as you:
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    results = you.search(query="global birth rate trends", count=5)
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    for result in results.results.web:
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        print(result.title)
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        print(result.url)
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        if result.snippets:
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            print(result.snippets[0])

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{
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  "results": {
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    "web": [
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      {
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        "url": "https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/population",
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        "title": "Population | World Bank",
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        "description": "The World Bank tracks global birth rate and population trends.",
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        "snippets": [
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          "Global fertility rates have declined significantly over the past five decades, falling from an average of 5 births per woman in 1960 to around 2.3 today."
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        ],
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        "page_age": "2025-10-01T00:00:00",
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        "favicon_url": "https://ydc-index.io/favicon?domain=worldbank.org&size=128"
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      }
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    ]
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  },
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  "metadata": {
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    "query": "global birth rate trends",
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    "search_uuid": "a1b2c3d4-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
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    "latency": 0.38
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  }
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}

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from youdotcom import You
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from youdotcom.models import Extraction, ExtractionFormat, ExtractionMode
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with You() as you:
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    results = you.search(
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        query="global birth rate trends",
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        count=5,
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        extraction=Extraction(
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            extraction_mode=ExtractionMode.FULL_PAGE,
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            full_page={"extraction_formats": [ExtractionFormat.MARKDOWN]},
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        ),
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    )
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    for result in results.results.web:
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        if result.contents and result.contents.markdown:
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            print(result.title)
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            print(result.contents.markdown[:400])

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from youdotcom import You
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with You() as you:
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    response = you.answer(
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        query="What are the main drivers of the global decline in birth rates?",
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    )
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    print(response.answer)
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    print(f"\n--- {len(response.citations or [])} citations ---")
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    for i, citation in enumerate(response.citations or [], 1):
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        print(f"[{i}] {citation.source}")

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{
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  "answer": "Global fertility rates have declined over the past five decades due to a combination of increased access to contraception, rising female education and labor force participation, higher costs of raising children, and urbanization. [[1, 2, 3]]",
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  "citations": [
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    {
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      "source": "https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/population",
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      "excerpts": [
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        "Global fertility rates have declined significantly over the past five decades, falling from an average of 5 births per woman in 1960 to around 2.3 today."
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      ]
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    }
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  ],
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  "results": {
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    "web": [
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      {
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        "url": "https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/population",
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        "title": "Population | World Bank",
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        "snippets": ["Global fertility rates have declined significantly over the past five decades..."]
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      }
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    ]
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  }
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}

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from youdotcom import You
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from youdotcom.models import ContentsFormats
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with You() as you:
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    pages = you.contents(
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        urls=[
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            "https://competitor-a.com/pricing",
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            "https://competitor-b.com/pricing",
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        ],
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        formats=[ContentsFormats.MARKDOWN],
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    )
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    for page in pages:
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        print(f"=== {page.title} ===")
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        print(page.markdown)

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[
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  {
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    "url": "https://competitor-a.com/pricing",
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    "title": "Pricing — Competitor A",
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    "markdown": "# Pricing\n\n## Starter\n$49/month...",
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    "metadata": {
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      "site_name": "Competitor A",
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      "favicon_url": "https://ydc-index.io/favicon?domain=competitor-a.com&size=128"
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    }
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  }
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]

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from youdotcom import You
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from youdotcom.models import ResearchEffort
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you = You()
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res = you.research(
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    input="What are the tradeoffs between microservices and monolithic architectures for high-traffic applications?",
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    research_effort=ResearchEffort.STANDARD,
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)
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print(res.output.content[:500])
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print(f"\nSources: {len(res.output.sources)}")
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for source in res.output.sources:
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    print(f"  - {source.title or 'Untitled'}: {source.url}")

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{
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  "output": {
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    "content": "## Microservices vs Monolithic Architectures\n\nThe choice between microservices and monolithic architectures involves several key tradeoffs...\n\n### Scalability\nMicroservices allow independent scaling of individual components [[1, 3]]...",
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    "content_type": "text",
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    "sources": [
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      {
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        "url": "https://example.com/architecture-patterns",
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        "title": "Architecture Patterns for High-Traffic Systems",
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        "snippets": [
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          "Microservices enable teams to scale individual services independently, reducing infrastructure costs for components with uneven load."
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        ]
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      }
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    ]
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  }
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}

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from youdotcom import You
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from youdotcom.models import FinanceResearchEffort
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with You() as you:
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    res = you.finance_research(
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        input="What were the key drivers of NVIDIA's revenue growth in fiscal year 2025?",
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        research_effort=FinanceResearchEffort.DEEP,
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    )
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    print(res.output.content[:500])
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    print(f"\nSources: {len(res.output.sources)}")
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    for source in res.output.sources:
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        print(f"  - {source.title or 'Untitled'}: {source.url}")

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{
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  "output": {
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    "content": "For fiscal year 2025, NVIDIA's revenue rose to **$130.5 billion, up 114% year over year**.[[1]] The main driver was Data Center demand...",
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    "content_type": "text",
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    "sources": [
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      {
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        "url": "https://investor.nvidia.com/financial-info/financial-reports/default.aspx",
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        "title": "NVIDIA Corporation - Financial Reports"
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      }
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    ]
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  }
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}

Give Your Agent Access

Four ways to give your agent access to You.com, from zero-setup to installable skills.

1. Read these docs in any agent. Append .md to any page URL to get that page’s full content as plain-text Markdown — for example, you.com/docs/quickstart.md. For a complete index of the documentation, use you.com/docs/llms.txt. Each section also has its own index — append /llms.txt to any section URL (for example, you.com/docs/api-reference/llms.txt).

2. Search these docs from an agent with the Docs MCP server. Point any MCP-enabled client at https://you.com/docs/_mcp/server — no API key — and your agent gets a searchDocs tool that returns relevant passages with source URLs. See the Docs MCP Server guide for setup.

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{
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  "mcpServers": {
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    "fern_mcp_you-com-docs": {
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      "url": "https://you.com/docs/_mcp/server"
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    }
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  }
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}

3. Call the You.com APIs from an agent with the You.com MCP server. The hosted server gives your agent you-search, you-contents, you-answer, you-research, and you-finance against the live web. Connect without credentials to the free tier for you-search only (100 queries per day), or pass your API key for the full tool set. See the MCP Server guide for IDE-specific setup.

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{
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  "mcpServers": {
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    "ydc-server": {
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      "type": "http",
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      "url": "https://api.you.com/mcp",
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      "headers": {
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        "Authorization": "Bearer <YDC_API_KEY>"
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      }
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    }
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  }
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}

For keyless you-search, use https://api.you.com/mcp?profile=free.

4. Install Agent Skills for task-specific routing. Skills are instruction packs that tell your agent which tool or API to reach for and how to use it — current web search, URL content extraction, cited research, finance research, and integration discovery. Install all of them with one command, or pick the ones you need.

$
npx skills add youdotcom-oss/agent-skills

See the Agent Skills page for the full list, platform plugins, and what each skill routes to.

More Ways to Explore

Explore the APIs Interactively

• Web Search API playground
• Answer API playground
• Contents API playground
• Research API playground
• Finance Research API playground

Use the SDKs

Ergonomic, typed access to our APIs. The Python SDK covers Web Search, Answer, Contents, Research, and Finance Research. The TypeScript SDK covers Web Search, Contents, and Research.

• Python SDK
• TypeScript SDK

Try in Postman

Fork one of our pre-built collections, add your API key to the production environment, and send your first request without writing code.

Evaluate You.com

You.com provides an open-source evaluation framework and a reproducible methodology for benchmarking search APIs — so you can measure what actually matters: accuracy, latency, and information retrieval quality.

We’re the only search API provider with peer-reviewed evaluation research. Our methodology was presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2026 conference and received the Best Paper Award. Read the research:

1. Stochasticity in Agentic Evaluations: Quantifying Inconsistency with Intraclass Correlation
2. Randomness in AI Benchmarks: What Makes an Eval Trustworthy?

When starting your own evaluation, keep it simple: run count=10 with no filters on a representative query set, then layer in full page extraction if snippets aren’t providing enough context.

• How to Evaluate the Web Search API — methodology, dataset recommendations (SimpleQA, FRAMES, FreshQA), latency benchmarking, and a production checklist
• Agentic Web Search Playoffs — open-source benchmark comparing web search providers in agentic workflows

Our team can also design and run custom benchmarks tailored to your domain and quality bar. Talk to us

Use Cases

Ready-to-run sample apps built on You.com APIs. Each comes with a live demo and a fully forkable open-source GitHub repo — clone it, extend it, or use it as a starting point for your own project.

Pricing

You.com uses pay-as-you-go pricing based on the API and usage. All new accounts include $100 in free credits.

Quick Pricing Overview

• Web Search API: $5.00 per 1,000 calls (up to 100 results per call)
• Web Search API full page extraction add-on: $1.00 per 1,000 pages
• Contents API: $1.00 per 1,000 pages
• Answer API: $5.00 per 1,000 calls
• Research API: Starts at $12 per 1,000 calls (varies per effort tier)
• Finance Research API: Starts at $110 per 1,000 calls (deep) — $500 per 1,000 calls (exhaustive)

Track your usage and spending from the analytics dashboard. For volume discounts, annual pricing, and enterprise features, visit you.com/pricing or contact [email protected].