Tavily vs Exa vs Brave vs cloro: which search API is better for an AI agent?

For an AI agent, cloro is the better search API of the four compared here on accuracy and cost, and Exa is the better one on speed. In an open benchmark of 2,182 questions with one search each, it answered 80.2% of the multi-hop questions, against 64.0% for Exa, 53.9% for Brave and 48.4% for Tavily, at the lowest cost per correct answer. Exa had the fastest median search, 0.74 s against 7.96 s for cloro. Between Tavily and Exa, Exa wins on accuracy and speed, while Tavily costs less per search from its $100 Bootstrap plan up. Brave is the pick when the slowest searches matter, because its p99 latency was the lowest of the four. Tavily is the pick for page text and a written answer in one request.

• Accuracy: on 824 multi-hop questions, cloro scored 80.2%, Exa 64.0%, Brave 53.9% and Tavily 48.4%. On 1,000 short factual questions, Exa (97.3%) tied with it (96.9%), ahead of Brave (93.1%) and Tavily (91.8%).
• Latency: the median search took 0.74 s on Exa, 1.21 s on Brave, 2.00 s on Tavily and 7.96 s on cloro.
• Cost: per 1,000 correct short factual answers, cloro cost $1.98, Brave $5.37, Tavily $5.45 and Exa $7.19.

Tavily vs Exa vs Brave vs cloro: which one answers more questions?

Six web search APIs ran on three public question sets in November 2026, with one search and 10 results per question. One model answered from the results alone, and a second model graded each answer. Four of the six are in the table.

A paired test counts, on the same questions, the ones that only one API answered correctly, so easy and hard questions cancel out. In every pair that is not a tie, the API named first won.

cloro lost none of its nine pairs and tied two: Exa on short factual questions and Brave on recent events. Among the other three, Exa wins on factual and multi-hop questions, and all three tie on recent events.

The FRAMES gap is mostly coverage. When each API did answer, it was right 73.5% to 81.3% of the time. The "not found" count, from 11 to 295, made most of the gap. For an agent, each "not found" is a second search, a page fetch or a failed task. One row of Tavily's results file, shortened:

{"id": "661", "provider": "tavily", "problem": "What year was the first Uber employee born?",
 "gold": "1983", "search_latency_s": 1.937, "answer": "NOT FOUND", "grade": "NOT_ATTEMPTED"}

The other three APIs all answered "1983" from one search on the same question.

Does calling Tavily, Exa and Brave together fix multi-hop questions?

Only partly. We counted, from the public results files, the FRAMES questions where at least one of Tavily, Exa and Brave was right. That is 628 of 824, or 76.2%. It is an upper bound, because a real agent also has to pick the right answer from three. On 63 questions all three replied "not found".

One search on cloro did better: 661 of 824, or 80.2%. It got 104 questions that none of the three got, and the three together got 71 that it missed. Three searches also cost $17 per 1,000 questions at the 100,000-a-month prices below, against $1.92 for one.

Which one is faster?

The table times the search request alone, on the 615 SimpleQA Verified rows that ran with no other benchmark at the same time.

cloro is the slowest of the four, with a median search of 7.96 s. For replies in under 3 seconds, Exa, Brave and Tavily all fit at the median.

Brave is the steadiest: its slowest 1% took 0.4 s more than its median, against 3.4 to 3.5 s more for Tavily and Exa. An agent that waits for every search in a loop feels the tail more than the median.

One limit to plan for: Brave returned HTTP 422 on 8 FRAMES questions longer than 400 characters, on every attempt. An agent that sends the whole user question as the query should cut it first.

What does each one cost per 1,000 searches?

Live rates, from each vendor's pricing page:

The benchmark ran Exa in auto mode with highlights, which Exa's own costDollars field priced at $0.007 a request; the $4 modes were not tested. Tavily's advanced search costs 2 credits.

From the $100 Bootstrap plan up, Tavily costs less per search than Exa. On pay as you go it costs $8.71 per 1,000 correct SimpleQA answers, against $7.19 for Exa.

What does each one return to an agent?

The sources differ. In a separate test of 500 queries against Google's live results, Tavily returned 80% of Google's top-10 domains, in its own order (rank correlation 0.03). Brave returned 65%, and kept Google's order best (0.55). Exa returned 44%, by design: it finds pages that keyword ranking puts low. A Google SERP API returns Google's own page, AI Overview included, which suits an agent that must see what Google shows. The AI Overview does much of the work: with it removed from the saved results, accuracy on 100 SimpleQA Verified questions fell from 99% to 86%.

The amount of text differs too. On FRAMES the reader read 5,216 tokens per question from Exa, 3,865 from Brave, 3,192 from Tavily and the least, 901, from cloro. If you pay per input token, Exa's highlights cost the most to read.

Which one should your agent use?

How this was checked

This comparison is published by cloro, which sells one of the six APIs in the benchmark and ran it. The harness, the questions, the settings and all 13,092 graded answers are in the public benchmark repo. The reader was gpt-5.6-luna and the grader gpt-5.6-sol. The runs were on November 4 to 11, 2026. Request settings: Google search with the AI Overview, country US; Exa type=auto with highlights; Brave extra_snippets=true; Tavily search_depth=basic. The answer options (include_answer, summary) were off. Latency is the search request alone, from one machine with 4 requests in parallel. Parallel and SerpApi were also in the benchmark, and their rows are in the repo. Serper was not tested.

The three-API counts and the example row come from the repo's FRAMES results files. The 500-query index test ran on July 8, 2026.

One search measures the search API alone; an agent that searches several times can score higher with any of these. Test on the question set closest to your agent's:

python3 benchmark.py --dataset frames --providers cloro,tavily,exa,brave --n 100 --workers 4

Prices: Tavily credits, Tavily pricing, Exa and Brave, all read on November 15, 2026. For error handling and auth rather than answers, Rhumb's AN Score comparison scores Exa, Tavily, Brave and Serper on 20 ergonomics measures. The Tavily and Exa pair alone, with each plan priced by volume, is in Tavily vs Exa.