You.com Research

You.com's Research API — cited multi-step web research, billed per call

Agent Reports Research You

Research & Data Usage_based Has API

Researched 1 Oct 2026 · Published 19 May 2026, 08:00 SGT · Reviewed 1 Oct 2026

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RECATOOLS Score

6.8 / 10

Capability

Value for money

Ease of use

7.5

ASEAN readiness

API quality

Founded

2024

Palo Alto, California, USA

Overview

You.com Research is now a developer API: it runs multi-step web research and returns cited answers at five effort levels, from $12 to $1,200 per 1,000 calls, with $100 of free credit. The consumer ARI research chat closed to new subscribers on 4 August 2026, after the free plan ended in April.

Pricing

Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 1 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete.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.

Lite

$12 per 1,000 calls

Fastest, cheapest research effort

Cited answers
$100 free credit to start

Standard

$50 per 1,000 calls

Default multi-step research

Cited answers
Broader source coverage

Deep

$100 per 1,000 calls

Longer research runs

More sources per answer
Finance variant $110

Exhaustive

$450 per 1,000 calls

Most thorough self-serve level

Finance variant $500

Frontier

$1,200 per 1,000 calls

Through sales; background jobs only

30s to 12,000s per job (median ~300s)

Use cases

Deep research Report generation Citation-grounded synthesis

What you can produce with You.com Research

Multi-step web research API with cited answers
Five research effort levels, Lite to Frontier
Finance-tuned research variant
Web Search, Contents and Answer APIs alongside
$100 of free API credit for new accounts

RECATOOLS Verdict

You.com has stopped selling research to individuals: its free plan ended in April 2026, and from 4 August chat closed to new subscribers, leaving the Research API as the product. That API is reasonable infrastructure for anyone building agents — multi-step web research with citations, five effort levels from $12 to $1,200 per 1,000 calls, and $100 of free credit to test it. The benchmark claims attached to it are You.com's own, including a 2025 win over OpenAI's Deep Research measured on a benchmark it built itself, so test on your own questions. For a personal deep-research subscription, look at ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead; for a cited-research component inside your own product, it is worth a trial against Perplexity's and Exa's APIs.

Desk research by RECATOOLS from public sources, written with AI assistance — not a hands-on test. How we review

What we found

This entry used to describe You.com's consumer research agent, ARI — short for Advanced Research & Insights — sold through Pro and Max chat subscriptions. That product is closing to new customers. You.com ended its unlimited free plan on 3 April 2026, and from 4 August 2026 chat became available to existing paid subscribers only, with no new subscriptions and no way back for anyone who cancels. Its pricing page now lists nothing but APIs, so what you can actually buy today is the Research API.

The Research API takes a question, runs multi-step web research and returns a cited answer, at five effort levels priced per 1,000 calls: Lite $12, Standard $50, Deep $100, Exhaustive $450 and Frontier $1,200, the last sold through sales and run in the background, where You.com says jobs take from 30 seconds to more than three hours, about five minutes at the median. A finance-tuned variant costs $110 or $500 per 1,000 calls. New accounts start with $100 of free credit. Sibling APIs cover web search ($5 per 1,000 calls, with 100 free queries a day), page contents and short answers.

Treat the performance claims as marketing. You.com says the Research API launched first on the DeepSearchQA benchmark with 83.67% accuracy. Its better-known headline — ARI beating OpenAI's Deep Research 76% of the time — dates from May 2025, applied to ARI Enterprise, and was measured on DeepConsult, a benchmark You.com built and released the same day, with OpenAI's o3-mini as judge. The company said ARI cited more than three times as many sources; VentureBeat's coverage put typical reports at five to ten minutes. None of these figures has been independently reproduced, and every deep-research tool still needs its conclusions checked.

The shift fits You.com's wider pivot from consumer search to infrastructure for other companies' agents. Its about page lists Richard Socher as chief executive and also as co-founder of a new company, Recursive. If you wanted a personal research subscription, look elsewhere; if you are building an agent that needs cited research as a component, the API is the product to evaluate.

Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.

About this listing

Researched on Thursday, 1 October 2026

Published on Tuesday, 19 May 2026 at 08:00 SGT (UTC+8)

Last reviewed Thursday, 1 October 2026 (2 weeks ago)

This entry was compiled from publicly available data including You.com Research's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with You.com Research unless explicitly stated.

Data accuracy

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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