DeepSeek Launches Low-Cost Search API for Agent Workflows

Artificial Analysis (@ArtificialAnlys) · 2026-10-22 04

DeepSeek Search debuts on the Artificial Analysis Search Index at 69, 17th of 27 search products, at the lowest price of any paid Search API on the board

@deepseek_ai launched its Search API on 17 October. We benchmarked it in our Stirrup agent harness, where GPT-5.6 Luna (medium) calls DeepSeek Search as its web_search tool to complete a combination of tasks from BrowseComp, DeepSearchQA and AA-Omniscience.

At $0.75 per 1k searches, DeepSeek Search costs less per search than any other paid Search API we benchmark, below Octen, Parallel (turbo) and Parallel (fast) at$1. At about $0.032 per task, it is the 5th cheapest of 27 products, cheaper than 20 of the other 25 Search APIs (median$0.066) and level with Nimble (lite). TinyFish, Octen, Parallel (turbo) and Parallel (fast) cost less.

Key benchmarking results for DeepSeek Search:

➤ Artificial Analysis Search Index: DeepSeek Search scores 69, a 36-point lift over the same model with no search (33). It sits between TinyFish at 71 and Linkup (standard) at 68

➤ AA-Omniscience is DeepSeek Search's strongest benchmark: it scores 70% accuracy on our proprietary factual answer benchmark. This ranks 10th of 27, 3 points behind the joint leaders, Exa (auto, dynamic highlights) and Firecrawl (73%). BrowseComp, which needs multi-hop reasoning across several searches, is its weakest benchmark: at 63% it ranks 25th of 27, well behind the Perplexity variants and Octen (85% to 87%)

➤ Large search results: each search returns about 7k tokens, near the top of the board's range. Each result carries about 1.8k characters of passages from the page. This raises model cost: at about $0.023 per task, DeepSeek's model cost is the 2nd highest on the board, behind Linkup (flash, alpha) at$0.039

➤ 128-character query limit: DeepSeek rejects queries longer than 128 characters. 6% of the agent's searches hit this limit, and for 87% of these, the model's first shorter rewrite worked

Key details:

➤ Setup: GPT-5.6 Luna (medium) in Stirrup, DeepSeek Search API with need_content=false (page passages, no full page content) and 10 results per search

➤ Pricing: $0.75 per 1k successful searches. DeepSeek does not bill empty results

➤ Rate limit: 5 searches per second per account