Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and DeepSeek have all started selling search, and AI Agent has gained another infrastructure business.

Beating AI News Flash: Tencent announced that it is opening Yuanbao Search to developers through Tencent Cloud, supporting API, MCP, and Skill integration.

Tencent disclosed that this search service has a hundred-billion-level index and hundreds of millions of daily calls, and has already supported more than 50 internal businesses, including WorkBuddy, ima, and Tencent Video.

The underlying technology of Yuanbao Search originates 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 models to understand query intent, filter web pages, and rerank results, enabling Agents to directly obtain titles, summaries, sources, and publication times.

However, this is not the first time Tencent has provided search services externally. Tencent Cloud records show that the "Internet Search API" was launched as early as July 1, 2025. Alibaba Cloud was even earlier, launching an independent Internet search API on March 20 of the same year.

Volcano Engine upgraded its existing service to "Doubao Search" in June this year and officially released it in July. DeepSeek opened the Search and Fetch APIs of its self-developed search engine on October 17.

In terms of pricing, Yuanbao Search charges RMB 14, RMB 20, and RMB 26 per thousand calls for the Speed Edition, Standard Edition, and Flagship Edition, respectively, and also provides a free quota of 2,000 calls per month. The Speed Edition only supports public web sources; to use authoritative vertical sources, users must choose at least the RMB 20 Standard Edition.

By comparison, the DeepSeek Search API charges RMB 5 per thousand successful requests, Alibaba Cloud OpenSearch Lite charges RMB 12, and the Pro version was just reduced to RMB 18 on October 15.