Tavily
The search API built for AI agents — real-time web access, structured results, no hallucinations.
Overview
Tavily is a search infrastructure platform designed specifically for AI agents and LLMs. Founded in 2024 by Rotem Weiss and Assaf Elovic, it grew out of the viral open-source project GPT Researcher (26,000+ GitHub stars) and pivoted to serve enterprise clients needing reliable, real-time web grounding for autonomous AI workflows. Its API combines high-performance web search, intelligent crawling, and structured extraction into a single endpoint, delivering clean, citation-ready data directly into LLM context windows to reduce hallucinations.
In February 2026, Nebius agreed to acquire Tavily for up to $400 million ($275 million initial cash, plus milestone payments), folding Tavily's agentic search layer into Nebius's AI cloud platform alongside its Token Factory inference service. At acquisition, Tavily counted over one million developers in its community, more than three million monthly SDK downloads, and enterprise customers including IBM, Cohere, MongoDB, Groq, Monday.com, LangChain, and AWS.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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.
- Basic + advanced search
- Python/JS SDKs
- Community support
- 4,000 credits/mo
- Higher rate limits
- Email support
- 15,000 credits/mo
- Higher rate limits
- Email support
- 38,000 credits/mo
- Higher rate limits
- 100,000 credits/mo
- Priority rate limits
- Custom credit volume
- Custom rate limits
- SLA-backed support
- Security review
Use cases
What you can produce with Tavily
- A working agentic research pipeline that retrieves, ranks, and cites live web sources via a single API call
- Structured JSON search results with source URLs, relevance scores, and extracted text ready for LLM ingestion
- A RAG system grounded in real-time web data with measurably fewer hallucinated facts
- Integration with LangChain or LlamaIndex tools in under 30 lines of Python using Tavily's native wrappers
- An AI agent that autonomously searches, crawls, and synthesises multi-source reports on any topic
- Compliance-reviewed API architecture documentation covering Tavily's data flow for GDPR/PDPA assessment purposes
ASEAN Perspective
Tavily in Southeast Asia
Tavily's infrastructure is US-based with no published Asia-Pacific data residency option, and its privacy policy focuses exclusively on EU/UK GDPR and US state laws — PDPA (Singapore), Indonesia's PDP Law, Thailand's PDPA, and Vietnam's data localisation requirements are not addressed. Developers in ASEAN who handle regulated data will need to review data transfer obligations carefully before production deployment. On the positive side, Tavily's API is language-agnostic and handles multilingual web search well, making it viable for ASEAN-language agentic workflows; and its parent Nebius — backed by major GPU investment — may add regional edge infrastructure post-acquisition to serve the fast-growing APAC AI market.
Tavily is the default search API for agent builders for a reason: SDKs for Python and JS, native LangChain/LlamaIndex hooks, and clean structured output that drops straight into an LLM context window. The free tier (1,000 credits/month) is generous enough to prototype on, and at $0.008 per basic-search credit it stays cheap at moderate volume.
Two things temper that. Credits burn fast once you're on advanced search (2 credits/call) or running high-frequency agent loops — the $100/month Bootstrap plan tops out at 15,000 credits, and teams outgrow it faster than they expect. And the February 2026 Nebius acquisition (up to $400M) puts pricing and roadmap stability in question through at least 2026. There's no published APAC/ASEAN hosting region either, which matters for regulated buyers in Singapore or Indonesia.
What people say
A 4.3-out-of-5 score on aiagentslist.com is about as close to a consensus verdict as Tavily gets — reviewers keep circling back to the same thing: it just works inside LangChain and LlamaIndex pipelines without the usual glue-code tax. Developers building RAG apps and autonomous agents say the structured, citation-ready output cuts down on the manual parsing that competitors like raw SerpAPI or Google Custom Search still require.
The complaints are narrower but real. A GitHub Community discussion and threads on r/mcp and r/Agent_AI flag broken or dead links in results — Tavily indexes and caches pages that have since gone 404, and it doesn't always revalidate before serving them. Search quality holds up for broad topics but gets shakier on niche or highly technical queries, and free-tier users report hitting rate limits fast, which pushes serious usage toward a paid plan quickly.
Then there's the acquisition. Nebius agreed to buy Tavily for up to $400 million in February 2026, and the founding team stayed on — but six months in, nobody outside the company knows whether pricing, SLAs, or the product roadmap survive the integration into Nebius's Token Factory stack unchanged. For teams already committed to LangChain-style agent tooling, Tavily remains the default; for anyone starting fresh post-acquisition, it's worth a short wait-and-see.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Tavily grew directly out of GPT Researcher, an open-source autonomous research agent that Rotem Weiss built in 2023 — it accumulated 26,000+ GitHub stars before Tavily was even a company.
- Nebius paid up to $400 million for a company that was less than two years old and had raised only $25 million in total venture funding — a 16x acquisition multiple on funding.
- Tavily's co-founder Assaf Elovic was previously head of AI and data at Salt Security, a cybersecurity unicorn — giving the team an unusual security-first lens on search infrastructure.
- The company operates across three cities — New York, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi — reflecting its dual US/Israeli founding identity.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Tavily's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Tavily 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.
For the latest details, please refer to Tavily directly →
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