Tavily: The Web Access Layer for AI Agents, Explained
Tavily is a web search and extraction service for AI agents. When an agent needs current information, it asks Tavily, which searches the web, reads the most relevant pages and returns clean, model-ready text instead of raw HTML. It also crawls websites, maps their structure and produces cited research reports. It has become one of the most common ways to give agents web access, and it says more than 3 million developers use it. In February 2026, Nebius, the Nasdaq-listed AI cloud company, agreed to buy it.
The quick answer: Tavily is a well-established, easy-to-start choice for adding web search to an agent, with a free tier, a remote MCP server, a CLI and integrations across nearly every agent framework. Its focus is turning the web into usable context with safety checks built in, rather than building its own giant index. Since the Nebius deal it runs under its own brand as part of a larger AI cloud. Everything below comes from Tavily’s site, pricing and documentation, Nebius’s announcement and press coverage.
Tavily at a glance
Checked against Tavily’s site, documentation, credits page and Nebius’s announcement on November 13, 2026.
| Tavily | |
|---|---|
| What it is | Web search, extraction, crawling and research APIs for AI agents |
| APIs | Search, Extract, Map, Crawl and Research |
| Access | REST API, Python and JavaScript SDKs, remote MCP server, CLI with agent skills |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits a month, no card; limited use with no API key at all |
| Paid plans | From $30 a month, or $0.008 per credit pay as you go |
| Customers | IBM, Cohere, Groq, MongoDB, Writer |
| Company | Founded by Rotem Weiss (CEO); part of Nebius since 2026 |
What Tavily does
Tavily describes itself as “the web layer for AI agents.” Its documentation spells out the job: real-time search, content extraction, site crawling, site mapping and cited research, “returned as clean, LLM-ready content instead of raw HTML.” The company’s mission, in its own words, is to “onboard the next billion AI agents to the web.”
The five APIs cover different moments in an agent’s work:
| API | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Search | Find current sources on a topic, with basic or advanced depth |
| Extract | Pull clean content from specific URLs |
| Map | Discover a website’s structure before reading it |
| Crawl | Read many pages on a site, combining mapping and extraction |
| Research | Produce a cited report, comparison or decision-ready answer |
Search returns results already split into chunks with the most relevant passages, so an agent can reason over facts without loading whole pages. Tavily says it combines real-time search with caching and indexing to keep response times predictable.
Built-in safeguards
Tavily puts unusual emphasis on safety for companies. Its homepage says requests “pass through security, privacy, and content validation layers that block PII leakage, prompt injection, and malicious sources.” That matters because an agent reading the open web can encounter pages designed to hijack it. When Tavily raised its Series A, the lead investor told TechCrunch that governance for enterprise agents was the point: without it, “it’s just going to be the wild, wild west.”
How developers connect
Developers can start without an account: Tavily’s Search and Extract work keyless at a limited rate. A free API key adds 1,000 credits a month. From there:
- SDKs and REST API in Python and JavaScript.
- A remote MCP server that connects Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients with nothing to install.
- The Tavily CLI, which runs searches, extractions, crawls and research from a terminal, and installs skills that remind coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex to use Tavily.
- Integrations with OpenAI’s Agent Builder, Anthropic’s tool calling, LangChain, Agno and many other frameworks.
Pricing
Tavily runs on API credits. A basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced search 2. Extraction costs 1 credit per 5 successful pages (2 for advanced), mapping 1 credit per 10 pages, and research tasks between 4 and 250 credits depending on the model and the work involved. Failed extractions aren’t charged.
| Plan | Monthly credits | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Researcher | 1,000 | Free |
| Project | 4,000 | $30 a month |
| Bootstrap | 15,000 | $100 a month |
| Startup | 38,000 | $220 a month |
| Growth | 100,000 | $500 a month |
| Pay as you go | As used | $0.008 per credit |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Tavily also offers a startup program with 100,000 free credits and free access for students. Credits reset on the first of each month, and if you run out, requests stop until they reset or you upgrade.
Who uses it
Tavily names IBM, Cohere and Groq as customers in Nebius’s announcement, and TechCrunch’s 2025 coverage added MongoDB and Writer. Its homepage features a case study on Rox, a sales platform, titled “How Rox Cut Account Research from a Week to Seconds with Tavily.” Typical uses include financial services agents, sales agents researching prospects, and enterprise assistants that need current facts.
These are company-reported examples. Tavily is developer infrastructure, and we found no independent customer reviews to weigh against them.
The company and the Nebius deal
Tavily grew out of GPT Researcher, an open-source research agent released in 2023 that pulled live web data before ChatGPT could browse, and which now has about 30,700 GitHub stars. Rotem Weiss, a data scientist, founded Tavily to bring the same idea to companies. In August 2025 it announced a $20 million Series A led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global, bringing its total funding to $25 million.
On February 10, 2026, Nebius announced an agreement to acquire Tavily. Nebius didn’t disclose the price; Globes, citing Bloomberg, reported $275 million. Nebius said Tavily would keep its brand and customers, with Weiss and the team continuing to lead the product, and positioned it alongside Nebius Token Factory, its hosted model service, so developers can get inference and web search from one company. At the time, Tavily reported more than 3 million monthly SDK downloads.
How Tavily compares
Tavily’s main rivals are Exa, Parallel, the Brave Search API and Firecrawl. Exa builds and trains its own web index and leans on its structured data about companies and people. Brave runs its own independent index too. Firecrawl focuses on scraping and crawling specific sites into clean data. Tavily’s strengths are how quickly developers can start, its broad framework support, its built-in safety filtering and a full set of search, extraction, crawling and research tools in one API. Being part of Nebius may appeal to teams already using its cloud, and give pause to those who prefer an independent vendor.
If you’d rather not wire up search at all, Carly searches the web as part of its work and connects to thousands of apps, so you can ask it from ChatGPT, Claude or a text message to research a prospect and add the findings to your CRM.
Who Tavily suits
Tavily is a good fit if:
- You want web search in an agent quickly, with a free tier and no-key trial.
- You build with LangChain, OpenAI’s Agent Builder or another major framework.
- You need extraction and crawling as well as search, from one provider.
- You want built-in protection against prompt injection and data leakage.
Look elsewhere if:
- You want a provider that owns and trains its own web index.
- You prefer a vendor that isn’t part of a larger cloud company.
- You want a finished assistant rather than an API.
FAQ
What is Tavily?
Tavily is a web access service for AI agents. Its APIs search the web, extract content from pages, map and crawl websites and produce cited research, all returned as clean text that language models can use.
Is Tavily free?
Tavily’s free Researcher plan includes 1,000 API credits a month with no credit card. Search and Extract can also be tried without an API key at a limited rate.
Who owns Tavily?
Nebius, the AI cloud company, agreed to acquire Tavily in February 2026. Tavily continues operating under its own brand, led by founder and CEO Rotem Weiss.
Does Tavily have an MCP server?
Yes. Tavily runs a remote MCP server that connects Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients without a local install.
How much does Tavily cost?
A basic search costs 1 credit. Monthly plans run from $30 for 4,000 credits to $500 for 100,000, and pay as you go is $0.008 per credit.
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