Octen

Octen is search infrastructure for AI products: a web search API that decomposes a query into sub-queries, executes them in parallel, and returns structured results with real-time indexing and sub-100ms latency targets. Beyond broad search it offers image and video search, URL content extraction, text and multimodal embeddings, and model access through the same unified API — effectively the retrieval layer for agents, copilots and chatbots that need current information without hallucinating.

This is one of the most contested categories in AI infrastructure (Exa, Tavily, Brave Search API, Serper all fight here), so the differentiators matter: multi-language support, the query-decomposition approach, and embedding + extraction bundled with search so you're gluing fewer vendors together.

Who it's for: developers building LLM applications that must ground answers in current web data. The category is mature enough that you should benchmark on your actual queries — latency and freshness vary hugely by region and topic — but Octen's free start makes that comparison cheap. Watch long-term pricing once you're past the trial; search APIs are famous for usage-based bills that grow with your product.