GroundRoute pricing and alternatives: cached web search API, POST /v1/search, Search, academic

GroundRoute's site llms.txt Best cached web search API in 2026

50% complete: 3 of the 6 key fields we checkSee the 6 fields

$0.00per 1,000 searchesThe cheapest of the 40 plans we rank by price is ContextFetch, $499 monthly, Scale, POST /v1/search, at $0.384 per 1,000 searches.Octen, Parallel and Firecrawl are the best cached web search API providers in our benchmark.

Plan: BYOK one of GroundRoute's 2 plans

Call: POST /v1/search, Search, academic one of GroundRoute's 5 calls

API: Cached web search API GroundRoute's only API

Cached web search API

About this item

A copy at most 14 days old. You get pages from GroundRoute's index.
3 of the 6 key fields we check. Date, Text, Answer.
Nothing to pay. GroundRoute limits how many calls you get, but doesn't say how many.
One call. You send query to POST /v1/search. You set mode to "academic" and the Content-Type header to "application/json". You can also send max_results, freshness, domains, exclude_domains, lang and country. The call returns the matching web pages.
Who can get it: anyone who supplies their own engine API keys. Keep data: no limit. Use data: with conditions.

GroundRoute: cached web search API alternatives

The table starts with GroundRoute's cheapest paid plan. Next come plans from other providers with the price per 1,000 searches closest to GroundRoute's. Each plan in the table gives live data or data at most a month old.

	GroundRoute, top-up, Managed, POST /v1/search, Search, academic	Octen, $33,999 monthly, Max, POST /news-search	Firecrawl, $7,190 yearly, Scale, POST /v2/search
$ per 1,000 searches	$7.00	$3.00	$7.19
Completeness	50%	33%	50%
Billing	pay first	monthly	yearly
Pay	any amount	$33,999	$7,190
Enough for	as many as you pay for	as many as you pay for	about 83,333 calls a month
Freshness	14 days	1 minute	2 days
Who can get it	anyone with a payment method or credits on file	anyone	anyone at least 18 years old, or 13 years or older with the express permission of a parent or guardian

Every cached web search API provider we score, ranked

Sources

From each provider's own pricing page and docs, and from what providers tell us. We read this row from these pages on 2026-10-27.

Product details

The key fields this plan's answer can hold, then each filled column in its row on the sheet.

Date
Author, not in the answer
Text
Summary, not in the answer
Links, not in the answer
Answer

Price
$ per 1,000 searches	$0.00
Per	call
Billing	free

Aggregators
Aggregators	none

Charges
Most per search	50
Also pays for	from the same budget: Search, web · Search, news · Search, answer · Search, page

Not found
$ per 1,000	$0.00

In their words
Their pitch	One API for every search engine your agent calls.

Data
Freshness	14 days
Keep data	no limit
Use data	Search results originate from third-party Search Providers and are subject to their rights and terms, GroundRoute makes no claim of ownership over them and grants no rights beyond passing them through to you. You are responsible for how you use returned results. You agree not to use the Service to: violate any law, regulation, or third-party right, or any Search Provider's terms, send queries or fetch content for unlawful, infringing, deceptive, or harmful purposes, circumvent rate limits, quotas, billing, or access controls, or share access to evade metering, attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service, other customers' data, or our infrastructure, scrape, resell, or redistribute the Service in a way that competes with GroundRoute as a routing layer without our written consent, introduce malware, or use the Service to facilitate denial-of-service, mass surveillance, or harassment

Plan
Pay	$0

Rate limit
Per second	30
Concurrent	30

The call
You send	query, mode "academic", Content-Type header "application/json". Optional: max_results, freshness, domains, exclude_domains, lang, country
Method	POST
Path	/v1/search

About the plan
Plan	BYOK
Who can get it	anyone who supplies their own engine API keys

The 44 fields the plan's answer can hold

request ID, tenant ID, URL, page title, snippet, page content, relevance score, source engine, published date, position, answer, citation URL, citation title, citation index, degraded, routing strategy, query class, chosen engine, routing reason, routing candidates, provider cost, latency, failover engine, missing engines, cache tier, poolable, poolability reason, freshness bucket, private cache key, pooled cache key, cached at, TTL, cost avoided, similarity, quality score, quality components, judge sampled, engine agreement, account ID, API key ID, timestamp, billable, searches counted, provider key source