October 2025 API Roundup: Introducing MCP, Enhanced Search API, and More

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Overview

Welcome to the October API Roundup! This month, we're thrilled to introduce functionality that represents a major leap forward in our AI search infrastructure capabilities. Our latest releases are designed to empower developers with more sophisticated search and agent functionality.

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October marks a significant milestone in our journey to make advanced AI capabilities more accessible and actionable for developers. We're excited to share four major product launches that expand what's possible with the You.com API platform:

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• Model Context Protocol (MCP):  A new server for you.com’s Web Search API protocol that standardizes how developers interact with language models and agentic systems.
• Search API Enhancements: Industry-leading (93%) accuracy on SimpleQA, new livecrawl parameters for flexible content retrieval, and a standalone Content API for on-demand webpage access.
• Advanced Agent API: Our most sophisticated API offering, enabling complex multi-step reasoning, planning, and research capabilities.
• Custom Agent API: Programmatic access to your Express Custom Agents, bringing your custom instructions into API workflows.

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These releases represent months of development focused on three core principles: removing complexity for developers, providing transparency in costs and capabilities, and enabling more powerful, flexible AI applications. Whether you're building conversational experiences, research tools, or workflow automation, these new capabilities are designed to help you deliver more value to your users.

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Read on to learn about what's new, explore the technical details, and discover how you can get started with these powerful new features. As always, we're eager to hear your feedback and see what you build with these enhanced capabilities.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

We're excited to introduce you.com’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, bringing comprehensive web search capabilities to your agentic IDE. groundbreaking new server protocol that standardizes and streamlines how developers interact with large language models and agentic systems. 

What is MCP?

MCP provides a unified, extensible interface for sending context, instructions, and tool calls to language models. Instead of managing the complexity of different model APIs, MCP offers a single protocol that abstracts these interactions while enabling more powerful, flexible AI applications.

Key Features & Capabilities

• Web and news search using You.com’s unified Search API.
• Multiple deployment options - remote server (recommended) or local NPM package.
• Secure authentication with API keys.
• Advanced search operators including site filtering, file types, language filtering, exact terms.
• Support for multiple transport protocols (Stdio and HTTP).

Why MCP Matters for Developers

• Reduced Integration Time: Standardized interface across providers.
• Enhanced Capabilities: Contextual augmentation, tool orchestration, and multi-step reasoning.
• Future-Proofing: Adapts with the evolving AI ecosystem.

Use Cases

• ‍Conversational AI: Power chatbots and virtual assistants with up-to-date info and custom tools.‍
• Research Agents: Enable agents to search, analyze, and synthesize findings.‍
• Workflow Automation: Orchestrate complex business processes with reasoning and planning.‍
• Custom Plugins: Expose proprietary tools/data sources to LLMs securely.

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Learn more: MCP Documentation

Search API: The Most Accurate Search for AI with New Livecrawl Parameters & Content API

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You.com’s Search API now achieves 93% on SimpleQA, the highest in the industry! To achieve this feat, You.com expanded our index and improved our crawling infrastructure to continuously refresh results and keep them accurate (evaluation code is open source on GitHub).

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You get full control over what you retrieve and how, making this the most flexible and accurate web API for AI agents, research systems, and production AI infrastructure.

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To achieve this, we not only were able to deliver industry-leading accuracy, but also provide developers with more control over your search results. Here’s now:

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New Livecrawl Parameters: You can now fetch full page content directly from search results with two new parameters:

• livecrawl — specify which sections to crawl (web, news, or all)
• livecrawl_format — get content as html or markdown

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‍New Content API: Our standalone Content API endpoint lets you retrieve the HTML or Markdown of any target webpage on demand.

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Learn more: Search API Documentation

Advanced Agent API

Introducing the Advanced Agent API, our most sophisticated API offering designed to empower developers with complex multi-step reasoning, planning, and research capabilities. This API represents a major leap forward in making advanced agentic workflows accessible through a fully packaged, developer-friendly interface.

What is the Advanced Agent API?

The Advanced Agent API enables developers to construct sophisticated agents capable of handling complex queries by breaking them down into workflow steps, executing each step iteratively, reflecting on findings, and generating comprehensive responses. Instead of building complex orchestration pipelines from scratch, developers can leverage our composite tools and advanced parameterization to create powerful agentic experiences.

Key Features & Capabilities

• Multi-Turn Reasoning and Planning: Decompose queries into workflow steps, execute iteratively, and generate comprehensive responses.
• Agentic Research Tool: Plan and iteratively gather relevant information from the web
• Advanced Parameterization: Fine-tune agent behavior with parameters for verbosity, workflow steps, replanning, and more.
• Comprehensive Output: Receive detailed, grounded responses with citations and workflow breakdowns, producing accurate and cited research reports.

Who It's For

• Fintech Companies: Automate market research and reporting.
• Healthcare Startups: Generate evidence-based research summaries.
• HR Professionals: Conduct comprehensive candidate and industry research.
• Enterprise Teams: Build internal tools requiring deep reasoning and planning.
• And more!

Use Cases

• ‍Automated Research: Generate comprehensive, cited research reports.‍
• Complex Question Answering: Handle multi-faceted questions with iterative investigation.‍
• Workflow Automation: Support business processes with intelligent information gathering.‍
• Knowledge-Intensive Apps: Combine search, reasoning, and planning for end-to-end solutions.

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Learn more: Advanced Agent API Documentation

Custom Agent API

We're launching the Custom Agent API, enabling programmatic access to your Express Custom Agents for the first time. This capability allows teams to integrate their custom agent workflows directly into applications and automation pipelines.

What is the Custom Agent API?

The Custom Agent API allows users to run their previously created Express Custom Agents programmatically via API. This is the first step toward making all Custom Agents (not just Express mode) available for programmatic execution.

Key Features & Capabilities

• Programmatic Agent Execution: Run Express Custom Agents via API using their unique agent ID.
• Seamless Integration: RESTful endpoints for easy integration into existing applications.
• Express Mode Support: Currently supports Custom Agents created with Express mode or specified LLMs.
• Custom Instructions: Leverage your UI-built custom instructions in API-driven applications.

How It Works

1. Create your Custom Agent in the You.com UI
2. Copy the agent ID from your agent's details or URL
3. Integrate the API endpoint into your application

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For a deeper dive, check out this overview of how to use this new functionality, presented by Christina Lucey, Product Lead at You.com.

Who It's For

• Enterprise Teams: Integrate custom agent workflows into business applications.
• Automation Builders: Add intelligent, customized responses to workflow automation.
• Product Teams: Embed custom agent capabilities into customer-facing apps.

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Learn more:

• Build Production-Ready AI Solutions with You.com's Express API and Custom Agents
• Custom Agent API Documentation
• Support Guide

Get Started Today

Ready to explore these new capabilities? Each of these features is designed to help you build more powerful, efficient, and cost-effective AI applications:

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• Start with MCP to standardize your model interactions across different providers.
• Power your agents with our Search API: industry-leading accuracy with livecrawl for real-time content.
• Try the Advanced Agent API for complex research and reasoning workflows.
• Integrate your Custom Agents into programmatic workflows with the Custom Agent API.

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As always, we're committed to making advanced AI capabilities more accessible to developers. These October releases represent significant steps forward in our mission to provide the most powerful and developer-friendly API platform for building AI applications.

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Questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Reach out to our support team or join the developer community on Discord discussions.

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Stay tuned for more exciting releases and enhancements coming soon. The future of AI development is here, and we're excited to build it with you.