Metaso 秘塔AI搜索
Chinese AI search engine with academic depth and pay-per-query API
Overview
Metaso (秘塔AI搜索) is an ad-free AI search engine from Shanghai that returns structured answers with timelines, outlines and cited sources across the web, academic papers, images and video, plus a pay-per-query API for developers.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 4 Sep 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with Metaso 秘塔AI搜索
- Structured answers with auto-generated outlines and mind maps
- Source citation and cross-reference tracing
- Academic search across Chinese + English databases, incl. PubMed
- Image, video and podcast search
- Deep Thinking mode powered by DeepSeek-R1
- Agentic Search: 20+ built-in agents chaining 5-15 tool calls
- Pay-per-query search API with official Python SDK
- Ad-free interface
Metaso is one of the more usable AI search products to come out of China: genuinely ad-free, strong academic-database coverage (it pulls from both Chinese and English scholarly sources, including PubMed), and a deep-research mode that assembles a cited, report-style answer instead of a single paragraph. For anyone doing bilingual research, it's a real alternative to Perplexity.
The catch is that it's built Chinese-first: the interface, defaults and mobile app onboarding (QR-code sign-in) assume a Chinese user, and there's no regional Southeast Asia pricing or localization. It's freely accessible outside China and the web search itself costs nothing to use. Developers get a genuinely cheap way in: the search API runs about 0.03 yuan (roughly half a US cent) per query with a 5,000-point free allowance, and there's an official Python SDK. Worth trying if you read Chinese and want a cleaner alternative to ad-heavy incumbents; less compelling if you don't.
What people say
Metaso's Chinese-language user base, reflected in discussion threads on Zhihu, the country's Quora-equivalent, leans positive on the specific use case it's built around: academic and research writing. Users highlight that it can build its own knowledge base from search results, auto-generate outlines and mind maps, and trace citations back to source documents, which is exactly what a student writing a thesis needs and a general search engine doesn't do.
The complaint that recurs most is about answer construction: Metaso's responses blend and compress multiple source types into one answer in a way some users describe as working against what they actually asked for, and several threads note factual slips, correctly locating a platform or source but then attributing content to it that was never actually there. That's a real caveat for anyone using it past the overview stage and into citation-dependent work.
On the technical side, Metaso runs on its own MetaLLM as the base model but also plugs in DeepSeek-R1 for its Deep Thinking mode, giving users a choice between fast lightweight answers and slower, more reasoned ones. In 2026 it added Agentic Search, a mode with more than 20 built-in agents that can chain 5 to 15 tool calls autonomously to both search and complete a task in one pass, pushing the product from pure search toward an agent-assisted research workflow.
Coverage-wise, it's genuinely broad: general web, Chinese and English academic databases including PubMed, plus images, video and podcasts, all searchable through the same structured-answer interface with no ads anywhere in the flow, a point Chinese reviewers repeatedly single out as a relief compared to ad-saturated incumbent search engines.
For developers, the API is priced to encourage experimentation rather than lock you in: search queries run about 0.03 yuan (roughly $0.004) each, question-answering calls cost more at 18 points per query, and new accounts start with a 5,000-point free allowance. There's an official Python SDK on GitHub for integration. The product is Chinese-first in interface and mobile onboarding, so English-only users get a usable but not fully localized experience.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Metaso 秘塔AI搜索's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Metaso 秘塔AI搜索 unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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