Linkup

Linkup is a Paris-based search API built specifically for LLM-powered apps and agents. The pitch is simple: give your model a single endpoint that returns either fresh structured web search results or a synthesized answer with citations, optimized for factual accuracy rather than SEO ranking. Linkup publishes that it ranks #1 on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark and lists customers including McKinsey, SNCF, Cohere, Legora, Polymarket, and Artisan AI. The API surface is intentionally small: one /search endpoint with two depths — standard for fast snippet-style retrieval and deep for slower, more thorough investigation that can power Perplexity-style answer engines — plus options for structured output, source filtering, and freshness controls. Pricing is pay-as-you-go and unusually transparent: roughly $0.005 per standard search and around $0.05+ for deep searches, with a Free tier including $5 in credit and no card required. Higher-volume plans add committed usage and dedicated support. Linkup integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK, and OpenAI's Agents SDK out of the box, and they ship an MCP server so any MCP-aware client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Goose) can use it as a real-time search tool with a single config line. Builders pick Linkup over Bing/Google clones when they care about factual correctness on hard, recent questions and want a clean API instead of scraped SERPs.