DeepSeek's search API bills only for hits and grades every site's authority from 0 to 4

DeepSeek opened its in-house web search engine to developers on October 17, selling two endpoints, Search and Fetch, at $0.75 per 1,000 billable calls each. A call is billable only when it returns a result, and every search hit comes with a DeepSeek score for the site's authority on a scale from 0 to 4.

The launch arrived alongside the company's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 model, which drew most of the attention. The search pricing and the fine print in its documentation are what developers building agents will actually pay for.

What counts as a billable call

According to DeepSeek's API guide, only requests that return HTTP 200 and produce a result are charged. A search that comes back with an empty results list costs nothing, and neither do failed requests or timeouts. For Fetch, which downloads a single page and returns it as Markdown, a call counts only if page content comes back.

The number of results requested does not change the price. A single search can ask for up to 50 results, and queries are capped at 128 characters. Both APIs are limited to 5 requests per second per account, no matter how many API keys the account uses, and Fetch adds a per-domain limit whose value is not published.

The scores attached to every result

Each search result carries more than a title and snippet. DeepSeek returns a rerank_score from 0 to 3, where 1.5 or above marks a high-quality match, and an authority score from 0 to 4, where 3 or above means a highly authoritative source and minus 1 means unknown. The guide does not explain how authority is calculated.

Results can also include a longer summary written for models, the full page content on request, and a publication date. Queries support familiar operators such as site filters, exact phrases, language and date ranges.

Free for coding agents, for now

DeepSeek says its search engine already handles hundreds of millions of requests a day. When Claude Code, Codex or DeepSeek's own Harness agent runs on a DeepSeek API account, the web searches and page fetches those tools trigger on the server are free for now. The release note says billing for them starts on October 31, 2026, at 16:00 UTC, which is midnight on November 1 in Beijing.

The documentation also says fetching "is subject to the target site's availability and access policies," and lists a 403 error for requests blocked by DeepSeek's security policy. It does not say whether Fetch honours the robots exclusion files that sites publish, how long fetched content is kept, or in which regions the APIs are offered.