Research for choosing APIs that agents can actually use.
Benchmark findings, integration patterns, and practical checks for developers building with coding agents.
Every Search API passed. That was the useful result.
All three Search APIs passed 27 of 27 retrieval attempts. The tie exposed why pass rates are guardrails, not product rankings.
More API research
How we benchmark Search APIs without grading vibes
A technical walkthrough of the protocol, normalization layer, evaluator, artifacts, and compromises behind our Search API benchmark.
Publication dates are metadata, not a search-quality score
Date coverage varied from 33% to 100% in our Search API run. Here is why that matters for some agent tasks and misleads in others.
We benchmarked three search APIs for coding agents
Exa, Perplexity Search, and Parallel Search all passed our retrieval test. The useful differences appeared in latency, metadata, onboarding, and integration surface.
What makes an API ready for a coding agent?
An agent-ready API reduces discovery, authentication, and verification work. Here are the signals we inspect before trusting an integration.
What coding agents need from Search API results
Titles and URLs are not enough. Coding agents need source rank, snippets, dates, stable shapes, and errors they can evaluate.