Jina AI Search vs Kagi Search API for AI agents
Jina AI Search is a search endpoint (s.jina.ai) that searches the web and returns the top results converted to clean, LLM-friendly text. Kagi Search API is programmatic access to Kagi's premium, ad-free search results for search products and agents.
The short answer
- Jina AI Search: Getting search results already converted to clean full-page text in one call.
- Kagi Search API: High-quality, ad-free results with clear terms that explicitly allow feeding results to an LLM.
Side by side
| Jina AI Search | Kagi Search API | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | The web (the provider does not name the search engine behind it). | Kagi's search results (web, news, video, podcasts, images per its MCP). |
| Returns | The top five results with URL and page content as LLM-friendly text; Markdown, HTML, JSON or text formats. | JSON search results; optionally full Markdown extraction of the top results in the same request. |
| Before the first call | An API key: search is blocked without one. | A Kagi account, an API key from the API dashboard, and billing set up (pay-per-use, prepaid credit or invoice). |
| Free | 10 million free tokens with every new API key; each search costs a fixed amount starting at 10,000 tokens (so roughly 1,000 searches at most). | Not stated on its pages |
| Paid | Not stated on its pages | $12 per 1,000 requests; Extract $4 per 1,000 pages. |
| Acting on a result | Through the web page each result links to | Through the web page each result links to |
| Limits on keeping or showing results | Not stated on its pages | No storing, caching or building a database of results beyond transient caching; cached results must be deleted on termination. |
| AI in its terms | Jina says it does not use customer request data, inputs or prompts to train its models; outputs may not be used to build competing services. | Sending results to an AI model to answer your users is allowed; training or fine-tuning models, or harvesting training/evaluation datasets, is not. |
| MCP server | Official MCP server: mcp.jina.ai (code: https://github.com/jina-ai/MCP) | Official MCP server: https://mcp.kagi.com/mcp (code: https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp) |
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use Jina AI Search?
An API key: search is blocked without one.
Is Jina AI Search free?
10 million free tokens with every new API key; each search costs a fixed amount starting at 10,000 tokens (so roughly 1,000 searches at most).
What do I need before I can use Kagi Search API?
A Kagi account, an API key from the API dashboard, and billing set up (pay-per-use, prepaid credit or invoice).
Is Kagi Search API free?
Its pages listed no free use when we read them on October 15, 2026.
Sources
Every line about another company comes from its own pages. Prices and terms change, so check the source before you rely on one.
Jina AI Search, read on October 15, 2026:
- jina.ai/reader: “Every new API key comes with 10M free tokens!”
- jina.ai/reader: “Every request costs a fixed number of tokens, starting from 10,000 tokens”
- jina.ai/reader: “return the top five results with their URLs and contents, each in clean, LLM-friendly text”
- jina.ai/reader: “Add mcp.jina.ai as your MCP server to use our APIs in LLMs.”
- jina.ai/legal: “Jina AI does not use Customer request data, inputs, prompts, or uploaded content to train its models,”
- jina.ai/legal: “use any Output from the Services to develop applications or services that compete with the Services offered by Jina AI”
Kagi Search API, read on October 15, 2026:
- kagi.com/api/pricing: “$12 /1k requests”
- kagi.com/api/pricing: “$4 /1k pages”
- kagi.com/api/docs: “The Search API is a feature-rich endpoint for search products and agents.”
- kagi.com/api/docs: “You can also request full markdown extraction of the top results in a single API request.”
- help.kagi.com/kagi/api/overview.html: “The API uses a pay-per-use model”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “Store, cache, or build a database of Results beyond the transient caching needed to operate your application.”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “including sending Results to an AI model to answer your users' queries.”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “Use Results to train or fine-tune a search index, ranking system, translation or summarization model”
- github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp: “The Official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Kagi Search & other tools.”