Research API
Our Research API researches a question and returns a complete, cited answer.
The Research API runs an autonomous reasoning loop that scales with the complexity of the question. It plans its own search strategy, breaks the question into sub-questions, and manages context across hundreds or thousands of reasoning steps. At the highest effort levels, a single query can run more than 1,000 reasoning turns and process up to 10 million tokens, well beyond what any single LLM context window can hold.
Configurable Research Depth
The `research_effort` parameter controls how much compute the API allocates to a query. Higher effort means more searches, deeper source reading, and more cross-referencing at the cost of longer response times. Four tiers are available: `lite`, `standard`, `deep`, and `exhaustive`. Pricing is fixed per tier.
Use Cases
- Research automation: Replace manual research workflows with an API call that returns a cited, synthesized answer.
- Question answering: Power internal or customer-facing Q&A with grounded, multi-source responses.
- Due diligence and compliance: Synthesize regulatory, financial, or competitive intelligence into citation-backed briefs.
- Content generation: Generate cited drafts grounded in real-time sources across any domain.
Enterprise
- 99.99% uptime
- SOC2-certified infrastructure with zero data retention
- You.com serves 1B+ queries monthly across 3,000+ enterprise customers, including 57% of the Fortune 500
Highlights
- **Synthesized answers, not search results**: Returns a structured, cited response to complex questions your application would otherwise have to research itself.
- **Configurable depth**: Four effort tiers balance latency, accuracy, and cost for any use case.
- **Real-time and cited**: Answers are grounded in current sources with full traceability via inline citations.
- **Enterprise-ready**: SOC2-certified, zero data retention, 99.99% uptime.