AskRobots API

Web search for your code and AI agents: plain JSON results, ranked on merit, never for sale.

Pricing

$25 a month, including 500 searches. After that, $0.05 a search.
Try it without a key: 10 searches a day per address on /api/search (below). After that you get HTTP 429 until midnight UTC.
Get an API key ($25/month) → on askrobots.com, where you buy, see your key and your usage. Keep the key out of code you publish. Questions: email us.

With a key

Send it as Authorization: Bearer <key> (or X-API-Key). The key works on /api/search and on the full API: search with filters, passages and page facts, site and URL lookups, links, the directory, page reading and answers. Endpoints and fields: /api/v1/openapi.json. AI agents can use the same key with our MCP server at https://search.askrobots.com/api/v1/mcp.

Limits and fair use

Without a key: 10 searches a day per address, and about 10 requests a second at most. With a key, your key's own limits apply.
Adding pages has its own, lower limits (below).
Send a User-Agent that names your project and a way to reach you, so we can talk to you before we block anything.
Please link to AskRobots where you show our results. The terms apply (no bulk copying of the index).

Search

GET https://search.askrobots.com/api/search?q=python+tutorial

The first 10 results for a query. The search operators work as on the website (q=docs+site:python.org, "exact phrase", -word, OR); see Search help.

{
  "query": "python tutorial",
  "count": 10,
  "results": [
    {
      "url": "https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/",
      "title": "The Python Tutorial",
      "snippet": "…this <b>tutorial</b> introduces…",
      "snippet_text": "…this tutorial introduces…",
      "score": 3.91,
      "quality_score": 0.84,
      "lang": "en",
      "category": "technology",
      "subcategory": "programming",
      "site_down": false,
      "ai_summary": null
    }
  ]
}

snippet is HTML-escaped with the matched words in <b>; snippet_text is plain text.
quality_score is 0 to 1, or null when we haven't scored the page. category and ai_summary may be null.
site_down is true when the site hasn't answered our checks for several days.
The API answers from our database index. Its order can differ a little from the website, which uses a newer, faster index; we'll move the API onto the same one.

Suggestions

GET https://search.askrobots.com/suggest?q=pyth

{"q": "pyth", "s": [{"t": "python tutorial", "k": "q"}, {"t": "python", "k": "s", "u": "python.org"}]}

t is the text, k its kind (q a search, s a site, with its domain in u). The browser format (OpenSearch Suggestions, ["pyth", ["python tutorial", …]]) is at /suggest/opensearch?q=.

Browser search engine

/opensearch.xml describes AskRobots for browsers and tools that read OpenSearch. To use it yourself, see Make AskRobots your default search.

Add a page

POST https://search.askrobots.com/api/submit
Content-Type: application/json

{"url": "https://example.com/new-page"}

Answers 202 with {"id", "status_url", "submission"}, then poll GET /api/submit/<id> for its status. A public page is usually searchable within a minute. Limits: a few pages an hour and about 20 a day per network, 20 a day per site, and at most 10 requests a minute. Pages must be public and allowed by the site's robots.txt.

Errors

400 a bad request (for example an invalid address), 403 a page we won't fetch (robots.txt, blocked site), 429 or 503 too many requests, 5xx a problem on our side: wait a little and retry.