DeepSeek has two API web-search paths — here's what each one returns

DeepSeek's API has web search available to anyone with a key. This is separate from the search toggle in the chat app — it's a normal API call, billed as model usage. It's come up here before so it's not news, but I hadn't seen any numbers on it, so I ran a batch of queries through it.

How it works. You call /anthropic/v1/messages with a web_search_20250305 server tool, which is what DeepSeek's own harness does. You get back a result list — 51 URLs with titles on one run. The page text itself comes back in an encrypted field the client can't read, so in practice it's URL discovery and you fetch the pages yourself.

What it costs. No separate per-search fee that I could find — you pay for the results as input tokens, which is also how DeepSeek's docs describe it. My batch of 20 assorted queries on V4 Flash came to:

• Flat tariff, until Aug 16: $0.0286 — about $0.0014 per query
• Off-peak, from Aug 16: $0.0488 — about $0.0024 per query
• Peak, from Aug 16: $0.0976 — about $0.0049 per query

(Measured on Aug 13, so the Aug 16 figures are recalculated at the published rates, not observed.)

Individual queries varied a lot — roughly $0.0004 to $0.0035 — depending on how many searches the model runs and how much content they pull back. Latency was 4–24 s. V4 Pro is about 10x the cost and slower still, so I wouldn't use it for this.

There's a second way to do it, and it works differently. /v1/responses accepts {"type": "web_search"}. Instead of returning a result list it browses: the output shows the model's search, open_page and find_in_page actions along with its actual queries, but you only see the pages it chose to open.

So: the first one if you want search results to process yourself, this one if you want DeepSeek to go read something and answer. The numbers above are all from the first — I only put a couple of queries through this one.