DeepSeek Opens Its In-House Search Engine to Developers at $0.75 per 1,000 Calls, With a 0 to 4 Authority Tier

Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates, 21 October 2026.

DeepSeek opened its in-house search engine to outside developers on 17 October 2026, releasing a Search API and a Fetch API alongside its DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 model update. The company's API changelog describes DeepSeek Search as an AI-native, general-purpose engine that indexes "hundreds of billions of web pages" and handles hundreds of millions of search requests a day. For SEO teams, the notable detail is in the response format: every result carries a page-level authority tier and a rerank score, and DeepSeek says the engine filters SEO spam, GEO manipulation and low-quality AI-generated content.

What changed

According to the Search and Fetch guide, the two endpoints are raw JSON APIs that use the same bearer authentication as the rest of the DeepSeek API. Search finds pages for a query and returns structured results; Fetch retrieves a single page and returns it as Markdown. The launch announcement says both are now "open to everyone" and priced at $0.75 per 1,000 calls per endpoint.

• Authority tier: each result has an authority value from 0 to 4, with -1 meaning unknown. The API reference says values of 3 or above indicate highly authoritative sources.
• Rerank score: a rerank_score from 0 to 3 that combines signals such as relevance, authority and freshness. Scores of 1.5 or above are described as high-quality results.
• Two summaries per result: a snippet of typically 100 to 200 characters for display, and a longer summary of typically 600 to 800 characters "intended to be read by a model". Full page content is returned only when need_content is set to true.
• Query operators: site:, -site:, exclusion terms, exact phrases, lang:, after: and before: are all supported, and the query is forwarded with its syntax intact.
• Volume per call: a request can ask for 1 to 50 results, and the guide says count does not affect the per-request price.

Item	Search API	Fetch API
Endpoint	POST /v1/tools/search	POST /v1/tools/fetch
Price	$0.75 per 1,000 successful requests	$0.75 per 1,000 successful requests
Account rate limit	100 requests per second	25 requests per second, plus a per-domain limit
Output	Up to 50 ranked results with authority tier and rerank score	One page as Markdown
Not billed	Failed requests, empty results, timeouts	Failed requests, no content, timeouts

Billing and free access

The guide states that a request is billable only when it returns HTTP 200 and produces a result. Calls made through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code or Codex already hit the Search and Fetch APIs as server-side tools, and those calls are free for now. The announcement puts the start of billing at 31 October 2026, 16:00 UTC; the guide gives the same moment as 00:00 Beijing time on 1 November.

What DeepSeek has not documented

None of the launch pages explain how authority tiers are assigned or how the rerank score weights its signals. The changelog says spam and GEO manipulation are removed through strict detection mechanisms but does not define GEO manipulation or describe the detection. The guide, reference and changelog also do not name a crawler for the search index. The Fetch section says only that fetching "is subject to the target site's availability and access policies", and that a 404 can mean a URL was blocked by site policy.

There is also an open question about where results come from. DeepSeek's privacy policy still says the company integrates "third-party APIs to provide search services" and shares users' input keywords with them. The new changelog describes the engine as in-house. DeepSeek has not said publicly whether any third-party search provider is still involved.

Context

Search APIs built for agents are now a normal part of the AI stack, and they create a second set of ranking systems that sit outside Google. What makes this launch unusual is that DeepSeek exposes its quality judgement directly in the response. Any developer can now see whether DeepSeek rates a page as tier 3 or tier 1, which is more than Google shares about its own systems.

The spam framing also echoes Google. On 15 May, Google's Search documentation updates log recorded that its spam policies apply to generative AI responses in Google Search, and its generative AI optimization guide tells site owners to prioritise SEO over "AEO/GEO hacks".

What this means for SEO teams

• Check how DeepSeek rates your pages. With a funded account, a site:yourdomain.com query returns up to 50 of your pages with their authority tiers and rerank scores. Run the same check for the pages that outrank you in other engines.
• Treat the scores as a black box. Because the methods are undocumented, use the tiers to compare pages, not as a target to optimise towards.
• Watch your logs. No index crawler is named yet, so record unfamiliar user agents and request patterns from late October onwards before changing robots.txt rules.
• Do not rely on GEO shortcuts. DeepSeek and Google now both state that manipulation aimed at AI answers is filtered or covered by spam rules.

Conclusion

DeepSeek has turned its search engine into a cheap, openly priced product and published a page-level authority score with every result. The pricing and limits are clear; the scoring, the spam detection and the crawler behind the index are not. Until DeepSeek documents those, SEO teams can use the API to observe how one more AI search system ranks their content, without assuming they know why.

Questions and answers

When did DeepSeek open its Search API?

DeepSeek's API changelog dates the opening of its in-house search API to 17 October 2026, alongside the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 model update.

How much does the DeepSeek Search API cost?

Search and Fetch are each billed at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Failed requests, empty search results and timeouts are not billed, and the number of results requested does not change the price.

What is the DeepSeek authority tier?

Each search result has an authority value from 0 to 4, with -1 meaning unknown. DeepSeek's API reference says values of 3 or above indicate highly authoritative sources. It does not explain how the tiers are assigned.

Are the Search and Fetch APIs free in Claude Code or Codex?

DeepSeek says server-side Search and Fetch calls through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex are currently free for DeepSeek API users, with billing starting on 31 October 2026 at 16:00 UTC.

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