Tavily is a search API built from the ground up for AI agents rather than human browsers. Founded in late 2024 and acquired by Nebius Group for up to $400 million in February 2026, it grew to over one million developers and three million monthly SDK downloads in barely fifteen months. The core product provides four endpoints — search, extract, crawl, and a newer research API — each returning structured, citation-ready JSON that LLMs can reason over directly. Results include concise summaries, source metadata, and relevance scores tuned for retrieval-augmented generation rather than the link lists traditional search engines serve.
The search endpoint offers multiple depth levels from ultra-fast to advanced, balancing latency against result quality depending on the use case. Extract pulls clean content from specific URLs, crawl maps entire sites, and the research API — currently in beta — chains multiple searches into an automated deep-research workflow. A built-in agent-native firewall screens requests and responses for prompt injection attempts, PII leakage, and malicious sources, addressing security concerns that come with giving autonomous agents direct web access. Tavily is model-agnostic and works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Mistral, and any other LLM provider.
Integration options include Python and TypeScript SDKs, a production-ready MCP server with over 1,500 GitHub stars, and native support within LangChain, LlamaIndex, Agno, n8n, and Vercel AI SDK. Tavily is also embedded in Nvidia's AI-Q Blueprint as the default retrieval layer for agent workflows. Pricing starts with 1,000 free searches per month, then $0.008 per request on pay-as-you-go with no volume minimums. Enterprise customers including IBM, Cohere, and Groq use it for production workloads requiring real-time web grounding.
