DeepSeek made its name with cheap AI models. Now it’s undercutting search API rivals, too.
Not content with challenging the major frontier AI labs with lower-cost models, Chinese AI company DeepSeek is setting its sights The post DeepSeek made its name with cheap AI models. Now it’s undercutting search API rivals, too. appeared first on The New Stack .
Chinese AI company DeepSeek is expanding its reach into the search API market, launching new APIs that allow developers to retrieve live web search results and webpage content for use in their own applications. These services, named Search and Fetch, cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests and can be used independently of DeepSeek's AI models.
The company also unveiled DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, an updated version of its V4.1 Flash model, released in September. The new APIs aim to simplify the process of integrating search capabilities into applications powered by competing AI models, eliminating the need for separate model requests and reducing latency and token costs.
DeepSeek has been developing its in-house search engine, DeepSeek Search, which currently handles hundreds of millions of requests daily and maintains an index of hundreds of billions of webpages. The company has also recruited engineers to build a multilingual AI search engine, capable of handling text, images, and audio searches.
As the market for AI search engines grows, other competitors, such as Exa, Perplexity, and Parallel, are also investing in their own search infrastructure to cater to AI applications and agents.
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