Two interfaces opened by DeepSeek's self-developed search engine: Search returns structured search results per query, and Fetch converts a single webpage into Markdown; calls initiated via DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex server-side tools are currently free, with billing starting from 2026-10-31 16:00 UTC.
Confidence: High (80) · Event time 2026-10-16
Reasoning
- 10-17 launched (recent development, not within the past 24 hours, 10-27 and 10-28 already received); listed again this period because billing starts at 0:00 on 11/1 Beijing Time, leaving only about 2 days.
- Official pricing: 0.75 USD per 1,000 calls per endpoint, sharing the same Key as the model API.
- Search count ranges from 1 to 50, supporting query syntax such as site:, -site:, lang:, after: / before:; each result includes a rerank_score from 0 to 3 (above 1.5 is considered high quality) and an authority rating from 0 to 4.
Usage
- POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/search，请求体如 {"query": "…", "count": 5, "need_content": true}; POST https://api.deepseek.com/v1/tools/fetch，请求体 {"url": "…"}.
- Include Authorization: Bearer <API Key> and Content-Type: application/json in the request headers; if you frequently perform online searches within Harness / Claude Code / Codex, check your call volume before billing begins.
Risks
- The official statement claims the index covers hundreds of billions of web pages and filters out SEO spam and low-quality AIGC, but no verifiable retrieval quality benchmarks are provided.
- Fetch is subject to the availability and access policies of target websites, so not all pages may be retrievable.
Open · DeepSeek API Docs · News 2026/10/17 · DeepSeek API Docs · Search & Fetch Guide