TypeTime-limited7Free Tier123New User28Free Only7
AccessAPI57Desktop37CLI22Web87App21
TagCoding29Agents30Work26Chat30Image31Video24Audio23Search16Embedded3Platforms21OCR4Scraping6Document Parsing6TTS8Compute2

Free AI Search Tools: Free Tiers, Limits

Free AI Search Tools

16 resources

Zhihu Open Data Platform

Search
10 calls/day (5000 calls/day after real-name auth, shared quota pool).

AI answers grounded in Zhihu's content library

    Parallel Search

    Search
    5,000 Free Requests per Month Run up to 5,000 requests per month for free across the Task, Search, Extract, Responses, Monitor and FindAll APIs; paid per request beyond that
    Up to $80 at Signup Earn up to $80 at signup plus $5 in free credits every month, applied before paid balance
    Hosted MCP, No Account The hosted MCP endpoint serves web search and page fetching with no account, no API key and no card, under lower rate limits
    Up to $250 for Startups Qualified startups can receive up to $250 in free credits by applying through Parallel

    Search and extraction for agents, keyless MCP endpoint

      Metaso Search

      WorkChatSearch
      Free refresh credits of an undisclosed amount each day (the policy states no figure); valid for the same day only, not carried over and cleared the next day

      AI search engine by Metaso with multi-source results

        Jina AI

        SearchEmbeddedScraping
        A new API key comes with 10M free tokens (shared across Reader, Embeddings and Reranker); 20 RPM without an API key, 500 RPM with a free API key.

        Search AI APIs: Embeddings, Reranker, DeepSearch

          Tavily Search API

          Search
          1,000 API credits per month, no credit card

          Real-time search & extract API built for AI agents and RAG

            Exa Search API

            SearchScraping
            Free: $10 credits per month (no payment method required)

            Semantic search and web content extraction API

              Microsoft Copilot

              WorkChatSearchImage
              Free GPT-level AI chat, web search, voice conversation, image generation, and up to 20 file uploads per conversation.

              Microsoft Copilot on web and Windows, GPT-5-class models

                You.com

                SearchChat
                Web Search API free tier: up to 100 queries a day via MCP
                No API key, no account, no credit card

                AI search engine with multi-model chat

                  Consensus

                  SearchWork
                  Free plan: 10 Pro messages + up to 3 deep reviews per month

                  AI research search grounded in peer-reviewed literature

                    Elicit

                    SearchWork
                    Free tier: unlimited search and summaries over 138M papers; Agent and Reports capped

                    AI research assistant for literature review

                      Brave Search API

                      Search
                      Free: $5 in credits every month ($5 per 1,000 requests); a card is required to subscribe to the free plan but is only used to verify identity and is not charged

                      Independent search index API with AI summaries

                        Firecrawl

                        SearchScraping
                        1,000 free credits/month (~1,000 pages scraped / 500 searches), no credit card required

                        Web scraping API turning URLs into clean Markdown/JSON for LLMs

                          Context.dev

                          SearchScraping
                          Free Tier $0/month: 1,000 credits/mo, renewing monthly with no overage, no credit card required; 2 concurrent requests per organization with no per-minute cap; Scrape from 1 credit per call; 10K one-time Logo Link requests

                          Web scraping and brand-data API for AI apps

                            Apify

                            SearchScraping
                            Free plan with monthly platform credits: $5/month platform usage (≈25 CU)

                            Web scraping & automation platform with a free plan

                              Browserbase

                              SearchScraping
                              Free plan: 1 browser hour, 1,000 Search API calls, 1,000 Fetch API calls, 3 concurrent browsers, 15 min/session, $5 in model tokens

                              Cloud browser infrastructure that lets AI agents operate the web

                                Valyu API

                                Search
                                New accounts get $10 in free credits ($20 with a work email), usable across every source

                                Real-time search and deep-research API for AI agents