Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek have all launched search services, adding a new infrastructure business for AI agents.

Dongcha Beating AI Flash News: Tencent announced it is opening its Yuanbao Search to developers via Tencent Cloud, supporting API, MCP, and Skill integrations. The company disclosed that the search service boasts a trillion-level index, with hundreds of millions of daily calls, and has already powered over 50 internal services including WorkBuddy, ima, and Tencent Video. Yuanbao Search’s underlying technology is derived from Sogou Search. It integrates Tencent’s content ecosystem and connects to 157 authoritative sources across 13 industries including finance, healthcare, and legal. The system uses large language models (LLMs) to understand query intent, filter web pages, and re-rank results, enabling agents to directly access titles, summaries, sources, and publication times. However, this is not Tencent’s first time offering external search services. Tencent Cloud records show its "Web Search API" launched as early as July 1, 2025. Alibaba Cloud was earlier, rolling out its standalone Web Search API on March 20 of the same year. Volcano Engine upgraded its existing service to "Doubao Search" in June this year, with an official public launch in July. DeepSeek opened the Search and Fetch APIs of its self-developed search engine on October 17. In terms of pricing, Yuanbao Search’s Lite, Standard, and Premium tiers cost 14 yuan, 20 yuan, and 26 yuan per 1,000 calls respectively, plus a monthly free quota of 2,000 calls. The Lite tier only supports public web sources; to access authoritative vertical sources, users must choose at least the 20-yuan Standard tier. By comparison, DeepSeek Search API charges 5 yuan per 1,000 successful requests, Alibaba Cloud OpenSearch Lite is priced at 12 yuan, and its Pro tier was just cut to 18 yuan on October 15.