You.com vs Tavily in 2026

Keep both calls and change two lines

Your You.com call and your Tavily call keep their bodies and their parsers. Each one changes its address, and both carry the same SpecStream key.

# You.com: was https://ydc-index.io/v1/search
curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/you/v1/search \
  -H "X-API-Key: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "Who founded Mistral AI and when?", "count": 10}'

# Tavily: was https://api.tavily.com/search
curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/tavily/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query": "Who founded Mistral AI and when?", "max_results": 10}'

A team that has not chosen yet writes to either format and moves nothing later. Every parameter and reply field is in the You.com migration guide and the Tavily migration guide.

What 100,000 searches a month cost

At 100,000 searches a month, You.com costs $500. Tavily costs $800 on basic pay as you go, $1,600 on advanced, or $500 on the Growth plan for 100,000 credits. On SpecStream the same calls cost $100 on either path, and $500 with Tavily's advanced depth.

Add the text of 10 pages to each call. You.com's ceiling is $0.015 a call, $1,500 a month. Tavily Extract reads pages at $1.60 per 1,000 on basic. On SpecStream the page text in the search costs nothing extra, and the Extract API reads any page at $0.80 per 1,000.

Run the same question through both formats

This script sends one question in You.com's format and in Tavily's format and prints the top pages from each, side by side. Run it with your own questions before you move traffic.

import os, requests

KEY = os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"]
QUESTION = "Who founded Mistral AI and when?"

you = requests.post(
    "https://api.specstream.ai/you/v1/search",
    headers={"X-API-Key": KEY},
    json={"query": QUESTION, "count": 10},
    timeout=30,
).json()
for result in you["results"]["web"]:
    print("you.com format:", result["title"], result["url"])

tavily = requests.post(
    "https://api.specstream.ai/tavily/search",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {KEY}"},
    json={"query": QUESTION, "max_results": 10, "include_raw_content": "markdown"},
    timeout=30,
).json()
for result in tavily["results"]:
    print("tavily format:", result["title"], result["url"])

The most accurate web search API in the world

You.com's comparison page reports 92.09% on SimpleQA for You.com and 86.32% for Tavily, and notes Tavily's own 93.3%. The SpecStream Search API scores a 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions, with 978 correct, and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. The Extract API scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB. The scores and the method are at specstream.ai/benchmarks.

Prices known before the call

Tavily prices Research dynamically, between 4 and 250 credits a request, and You.com bills every request as one call whatever it returns. On SpecStream a search that returns nothing costs nothing, an Idempotency-Key header makes a retried call charge once, and each key carries its own spending limit.

When the job is a list, every company or filing that meets a set of conditions, Deep Search returns one row per match with a source on each value, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a delivered row. The most a run can cost is quoted before it starts, and nothing runs until you approve it.

Search, pages and rows on the same key

The same key reads up to 20 pages a call with the Extract API at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not charged. Agents connect through the MCP server at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp, where search_web and read_pages bill at the API's prices.

Exa

Search on its own index at $4 per 1,000 requests on lite and $7 on auto and fast, for up to 10 results. SpecStream answers Exa's POST /search at https://api.specstream.ai/exa, in Exa's JSON, at $1 per 1,000 searches.

Brave Search API

Results from Brave's own index at $5 per 1,000 requests, with $5 in free credits every month. SpecStream answers Brave's GET /res/v1/web/search at https://api.specstream.ai, at $1 per 1,000 searches.

Linkup

Search priced by depth: $0.005 a call at standard and $0.05 at deep. SpecStream answers Linkup's POST /v1/search at https://api.specstream.ai/linkup/v1 at $0.001 a search of up to 10 results.

Kagi Search API

Search results from Kagi at $12 per 1,000 requests, and Extract at $4 per 1,000 pages. SpecStream answers Kagi's POST /api/v1/search at https://api.specstream.ai/kagi/api/v1, at $1 per 1,000 searches.