# Jina, free: Web search API

> Reader can be used as SERP API. It allows you to feed your LLM with the content behind the search results engine page. Simply prepend https://s.jina.ai/?q= to your query, and Reader will search the web and return the top five results with their URLs and contents, each in clean, LLM-friendly text.

Jina's web search API on its Free API key plan. It costs $0.00 per 1,000 searches. It returns 3 of the 6 key fields we check: Date, Text, Links.
The cheapest of the 177 plans we rank by price is [Ceramic, $99 monthly](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/ceramic/99-monthly/llms.txt), at $0.20 per 1,000 searches.
[Search1API](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/search1api/19-monthly-basic-post-search-search/llms.txt), [Firecrawl](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/firecrawl/top-up-from-5-pay-as-you-go-on-scale/llms.txt) and [Valyu](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/499-monthly/llms.txt) are the best web search API providers in our benchmark.

- This page: https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/jina/free
- [Best web search API in 2026](https://datacircle.dev/best-web-search-api.txt)
- Get it: https://jina.ai/reader#pricing
- Request: `POST https://s.jina.ai/search`
- API key: with the plan, on https://jina.ai/reader#pricing
- Its API docs: https://docs.jina.ai/#tag/search/POST/search
- Sold by: Jina (https://jina.ai)
- Checked: 2026-10-27

## In the answer

- Completeness: 50%
- Date: ✓
- Text: ✓
- Links: ✓

## Price

- $ per 1,000 searches: $0.00
- Per: call
- Billing: free

## Aggregators

- Aggregators: none

## Charges

- Also pays for: from the same budget: Reader API · Embeddings API · Batch Embeddings API · Reranker API

## Overage

- Units cap: hard

## Not found

- $ per 1,000: $0.00

## In their words

- Their pitch: Reader can be used as SERP API. It allows you to feed your LLM with the content behind the search results engine page. Simply prepend https://s.jina.ai/?q= to your query, and Reader will search the web and return the top five results with their URLs and contents, each in clean, LLM-friendly text.

## Data

- Keep data: no limit
- Use data: "Customers must not (i) reverse engineer, decompile, translate or otherwise attempt to discover the source code or underlying components of the Services or Jina AI’s IP (except to the extent permitted under applicable mandatory law), (ii) use the Services in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates any third party rights, (iii) use any Output from the Services to develop applications or services that compete with the Services offered by Jina AI, or (iv) use automated methods to extract information, data or result from the JINA-AI website or the Services, including by means of scraping, harvesting, or web data extraction", "Jina AI (except as expressly stated otherwise herein) claims no rights to such Output and imposes no restrictions on the Customer regarding the use of the Output unless otherwise agreed in an agreement with the Customer", "To the extent that the Output consists of extracted or restructured content from existing third-party materials (e.g. websites, PDF files, search results, collectively the “Material”), the Customer acknowledges that any third party intellectual property rights in the underlying Material remain unaffected", "The Customer shall use the Services solely for the purposes established in the respective Order Form and Product Description"

## Plan

- Pay: $0
- You get: 10,000,000 credits
- Enough for: 1,000 calls

## Rate limit

- Per second: 1.67

## Speed

- Answer: in the call

## The call

- You send: q, Content-Type header "application/json", Accept header "application/json". Optional: gl, location, hl, num, page, type, provider, ext, filetype, intitle, loc, fallback, nfpr, X-Site, X-With-Links-Summary, X-With-Images-Summary, X-Retain-Images, X-No-Cache, X-With-Generated-Alt, X-Respond-With, X-With-Favicon, X-Return-Format, X-Engine, X-With-Favicons, X-Timeout, X-Set-Cookie, X-Proxy-Url, X-Locale
- Method: POST
- Path: /search

## About the plan

- Plan: Free API key
- Who can get it: anyone, for professional use only ("No consumer use is intended or directed")

## The 22 fields the plan's answer can hold

response code, response status, response metadata, page title, description, URL, page content, content chunks, published time, page HTML, page text, screenshot URL, pageshot URL, page count, page links, page images, warning, page metadata, external data, HTTP status code, HTTP status text, storage state

## Jina's plans (2)

- [Jina, free](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/jina/free/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 50% complete
- [Jina, top-up](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/jina/top-up/llms.txt): 50% complete

## Jina's calls (1)

- `POST /search`: [Jina, free](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/jina/free/llms.txt)

## Jina's APIs (1)

- [Jina: web search API pricing, 2 plans](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/jina/free/llms.txt)

## Jina: web search API alternatives

- [Search1API, free, Free, POST /ask](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/search1api/free-free-post-ask/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 33% complete, live
- [Firecrawl, free, Free, POST /v2/search](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/firecrawl/free/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 33% complete
- [Valyu, free](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/valyu/free/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 67% complete
- [Nimble, free, Free, POST /v2/search, Search, lite](https://datacircle.dev/web-search-apis/nimble/free-free-post-v2-search-search-lite/llms.txt): $0.00 per 1,000, 17% complete, live

## 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.

- https://docs.jina.ai
- https://docs.jina.ai/openapi.json
- https://jina.ai/api-dashboard/pricing
- https://jina.ai/api-dashboard/rate-limit
- https://jina.ai/legal
- https://jina.ai/reader
- https://jina.ai/tokenizer