DeepSeek Search and Fetch APIs for agents
Confirmed
The takeaway
DeepSeek added two raw JSON endpoints to its API, POST /v1/tools/search and POST /v1/tools/fetch, giving agents and RAG apps live web search (powered by DeepSeek’s in-house search engine) and page fetching as Markdown.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 17 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra169 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5108 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon199 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7138 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 108 days before it.
Key facts
- Endpoints (base https://api.deepseek.com, bearer auth): POST /v1/tools/search and POST /v1/tools/fetch (DeepSeek API docs)
- Search: query of 1–128 characters with operators site:, -site:, “phrase”, -term, lang:, after:, before:; count 1–50 (default 10); optional ori_question and IP-based localization; results carry rerank_score (0–3), authority (0–4), ~100–200-character snippet, ~600–800-character summary for models, optional full content
- Fetch: URL up to 8,192 characters; returns title and Markdown content; 403 if refused by security policy
- Price: $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests for each API; only HTTP 200 responses with results or content are billed; count does not change the price; Pandaily gives the CNY price as 5 yuan per 1,000 calls
- Free period: server-side tool calls via DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex are free for now; per-request billing starts 00:00 Beijing time, Nov 1, 2026
- Rate limits: 5 QPS each per account (Fetch also per domain), separate from model concurrency limits
- Launch date: the docs banner says ‘now available’ without a date; Pandaily reported it on Oct 17 (Beijing time); dated Oct 16 here
What happened
DeepSeek’s API change log now opens with a banner announcing the Search / Fetch API. Unlike search tools bundled inside a chat model, these are standalone endpoints any agent framework can call. The free tier for calls made from Claude Code and Codex suggests DeepSeek wants its search to be the default web tool for third-party coding agents running DeepSeek models.
Why it matters
Web search had been an add-on bought from Western providers (Bing, Brave, Exa, Tavily) or from Chinese search giants. A frontier lab selling its own search index at a low per-call price adds another piece of the agent stack under Chinese control, at a time when China is proposing export controls on AI agents.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 1 primary, 1 press
Primary
- DeepSeek API docs: Search / Fetch API guideapi-docs.deepseek.com, docs
Press
Changes
- Filed (DeepSeek docs read)