DeepSeek opened its in-house search engine to everyone through Search and Fetch APIs

On October 17, 2026, DeepSeek opened its in-house search engine to everyone through Search and Fetch APIs priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests per endpoint. Calls through server-side tools in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex were free until October 31.

Archive entry: this covers an event from October 17, 2026, and we published it on November 8, 2026. The details come from sources dated at the time and may have changed since.

On October 17, 2026, DeepSeek opened its in-house search engine to everyone through Search and Fetch APIs, as recorded in the DeepSeek API docs change log. The entry described the Search and Fetch APIs, with the price set for each endpoint.

What changed

The Search and Fetch APIs were open to everyone.
DeepSeek said its in-house engine handled hundreds of millions of search requests daily and indexed hundreds of billions of multilingual pages.
DeepSeek said it filtered SEO spam, GEO manipulation and low-quality AI-generated content.
Each endpoint cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.

What it meant for people building agents

Agent builders got a web search and page fetch backend from DeepSeek that plugged into Claude Code and Codex. The price applied to each endpoint, so search calls and fetch calls were each billed at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.

Free calls before billing

Calls made through server-side tools in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code and Codex were free until billing started on October 31, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, so until then teams could try the APIs in those tools without per-request charges.

Sources

Change Log | DeepSeek API Docs (DeepSeek, October 17, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.