Live information from outside your walls, in a shape a model can read.
| Option | What it does | Licence | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exa | Embeddings-native web search built for agents, with full-content retrieval. | Proprietary | No |
| Tavily | Search API that returns model-ready answers rather than ten blue links. | Proprietary | No |
| Firecrawl | Turns any site into clean markdown, including the JavaScript-heavy ones. | Open source | Yes |
| Brave Search API | Independent web index with straightforward per-query pricing. | Proprietary | No |
| SearXNG | Self-hosted metasearch. No third-party search vendor in the path. | Open source | Yes |
Live information from outside your walls, in a shape a model can read. It is optional; plenty of working agents skip it.
This registry tracks 5. 2 are open source and 2 can run on your own infrastructure.
It depends on constraints rather than preference: whether you must self-host, whether the budget allows a hosted service, and which language your team writes. Describe what you are building and the advisor fills this layer along with the other 9.
Every page here answers to Accept: text/markdown and returns the same content at roughly a tenth the tokens. No separate site, no toggle — same URL.
curl -s -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://newagent.build/layers/search