You.com

You.com is an AI-focused web search API platform built by Richard Socher (former Chief Scientist at Salesforce) and Bryan McCann (former Lead AI Researcher at Salesforce). The company provides three core APIs — Search, Contents, and Research — designed to give AI agents and LLMs access to real-time, grounded web data. The platform is actively available and targets enterprise developers building agentic AI systems, data pipelines, and research tools.

What It Is

You.com sits at the intersection of web search infrastructure and AI grounding. Rather than a consumer search engine, it operates as a developer API layer: teams query the Search API for real-time web results, use the Contents API to extract clean page text from arbitrary URLs, and call the Research API to get multi-step, source-cited answers to complex questions. All three APIs are accessible via REST, a Python SDK, and an MCP Server.

The Three APIs and What They Do

• Search API — Returns real-time web results with LLM-ready snippets, rich metadata, country/language targeting, and up to 100 URLs per call. Includes a News endpoint and live crawl at no additional charge.
• Contents API — Fetches full page content (clean Markdown or raw HTML) for batches of URLs, removing scraping complexity for content aggregation pipelines.
• Research API — Runs multi-step search and synthesis to return cited, source-backed answers. The platform claims the Research API ranks #1 in DeepSearchQA benchmarks and uses an AAAI Best Paper Award methodology. Five effort tiers (Lite, Standard, Deep, Exhaustive, Frontier) let callers trade latency for depth.

Enterprise Architecture and Security

You.com positions its APIs as enterprise-grade with several compliance-oriented features:

• Zero Data Retention — queries and data can be automatically purged
• SOC 2 Certified — independently audited infrastructure
• DPA-Ready — designed to accommodate Data Processing Agreements
• Custom QPS Limits — high-volume concurrency available for enterprise workloads
• No model training on customer data

The platform claims 300ms p99 latency (described as "2X faster than competition"), 10M+ news sources indexed, and 10M+ daily queries served at 99.99% uptime — all vendor-published figures.

Audience and Adoption Signals

You.com's homepage lists logos of OpenAI, Amazon, Alibaba, Thoughtspot, The Telegraph, Harvey, Windsurf, Databricks, and Salesforce as enterprises powering web search with the platform. These are vendor-published logo displays and should be treated as claimed customers rather than independently verified partnerships. The platform also offers a Startup Grant Program and targets media, consulting, and finance verticals with tailored solutions.

Update: Research API Expansion and AWS Marketplace Launch

As of mid-2025, You.com has been actively expanding its Research API capabilities — the blog notes "Additional Capabilities in the Top-Rated You.com Research API" as a current announcement. The company also launched its Web Search & News API on AWS Marketplace (July 2025) and introduced ARI Enterprise, described as a deep research platform unifying web, internal, and premium data sources (May 2025). These moves signal a push toward broader enterprise distribution and deeper research tooling.