You.com Launches API for Web Search and Retrieval Augmented Generation, Giving AI Chatbots And Large Language Models Real-Time Web Access And Unparalleled Accuracy

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--You.com announced today the launch of a first-of-its-kind self-service API designed to integrate seamlessly with any Large Language Model (LLM) and AI chatbot to provide unprecedented real-time internet access.

The YOU API is a suite of tools designed to help developers address some of the challenges LLMs and AI chatbots face, such as hallucinations, source citation issues, and outdated information, by providing the most relevant and up-to-date information via web search. This new index is built to be consumed by LLMs and not as a list of blue links like all prior web indices. This means the snippets are much longer and more likely to contain the relevant information to be summarized. In addition to the search API, You.com offers a full LLM+search endpoint for end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

“Since You.com introduced the first consumer-facing LLM with internet access, providing up-to-date answers complete with citations, we received many requests for an API with these capabilities,” said Richard Socher, CEO of You.com. “Our response is the YOU API, a comprehensive solution that equips every chatbot and LLM with the means to retrieve real-time information through web search.”

You.com is not only the first API to provide web search for LLMs and chatbots but also the most accurate. You.com put the YOU API through a series of tests using academic benchmarks, such as the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v1/v2), HotpotQA, FreshQA, and MS MARCO, and found that it stands apart from the field.

"We’re not resting on assumptions; we’ve rigorously benchmarked our technology,” said Bryan McCann, You.com CTO. “The results reveal that the YOU API outperforms the capabilities of search providers like Google and Bing when paired with a variety of LLMs. By using the YOU API, developers ensure that their LLMs leverage the most recent web information and receive data verified by testing protocols.”

Illustrating the real-world impact of the YOU API, Kevin Baragona, founder of DeepAI, which ranks among the top 50 most visited AI sites in the past 12 months, shared his experience with the YOU API: "We run a popular AI chatbot, lovingly called 'AI Chat,' which is often used for general knowledge or research use cases. Our users had been asking us to have the chatbot give up-to-date information, more recent than when the language model was trained, or even real-time data. We were super glad when we encountered You.com’s API, particularly its RAG feature. Within a week of development, we launched a new feature to our users, which we shipped as a checkbox labeled 'Online Mode.' Thanks to the RAG API, we were able to get the feature done in record time. Users tell us that 'AI Chat' acts like a completely new product with access to real-time knowledge. We feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible with the YOU RAG and search API, and we’ll continue building more great features with it."

You.com offers API pricing plans that cater to teams of all sizes, from a complimentary trial to customized enterprise solutions. Every plan includes real-time web search, multilingual responses, long snippets for AI, and rights to use data for AI inference and citations.

Learn more about how to use the API at docs.you.com. Visit api.you.com to start a free trial of the web and news search API. For the RAG endpoint, please email [e-mail] to get access.

About You.com

Founded by leading AI research scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, You.com is an AI assistant that helps you search online, write an essay, code, create digital art, or solve a physics problem. You.com pioneered many solutions for Large Language Model (LLM) challenges, especially around trust and accuracy. You.com notably introduced the first consumer-facing LLM with access to the internet to provide up-to-date answers and include citations and recently debuted an AI agent that executes code to provide the most accurate responses to math and science questions. You.com's API further enables other LLM-based chatbots to improve their accuracy with real-time web access. You.com is available via Chrome web extensions, iOS and Android mobile apps, and WhatsApp.