Tavily is a web search API for AI agents, made by Tavily Inc. An API (application programming interface) is an interface that another program calls over the internet. A program, often an agent built on a large language model (LLM), sends a query and gets back web content as clean text that the model can read.
The API has five endpoints. Search returns relevant web results. Extract returns the cleaned content of given pages. Crawl extracts content from an entire website, and Map lists the URLs of a site. Research runs an agent that does in-depth web research and returns cited results. Results come structured and split into chunks, so that a model can rely on current facts. Requests pass through checks that block leaks of personal data (PII), prompt injection and malicious sources. Tavily also offers an MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way to connect tools to AI assistants) and SDKs for Python and JavaScript.
Tavily is a hosted service billed in API credits. A free plan gives 1,000 credits a month; paid use is billed per credit used, or as a monthly plan with more credits.