When you add search to an AI app, a Q&A agent, or a RAG pipeline, finding relevant pages is only half the job. Full pages are packed with navigation, ads, and other noise, and feeding them straight to a model wastes tokens and dilutes the key information.
Kimi Open Platform now offers three standalone REST APIs — Web Search Basic, Web Search Pro, and URL Fetch — that turn pages into ready-to-use information: structured search results, relevant passages, or the full body of a given page.
Web Search Pro is tuned for in-depth knowledge work and factual queries: it reads each page, extracts the passages most relevant to your query, and returns them ranked — along with an authority field (the source’s authority level) so you can evaluate and filter the results.Compared with feeding full pages to a model, the Web Search Pro API has four benefits:
- More accurate answers: key information stands out instead of getting buried in navigation and ads.
- Lower token cost: only the most relevant passages enter the context, so you spend fewer tokens and get faster responses.
- Less engineering: chunking and relevance ranking happen on the server, so results are ready for the model.
- Traceable sources: every passage keeps its title, URL, and site, so answers are easy to cite and verify.
This page covers how to pick the right API, control costs, write effective queries, and configure parameters, so you get more accurate results with fewer calls.
Choose the right API
| API | Endpoint | Returns | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web Search Basic | POST /v1/tools/search |
Titles, URLs, and snippets of relevant pages; page content included when include_content=true |
Showing search results to users, collecting pages, or when you want to process page content yourself |
| Web Search Pro | POST /v1/tools/search_pro |
The passages of page content most relevant to the query, ranked by relevance | Web-grounded Q&A, RAG, agents, reports and summaries |
| URL Fetch | POST /v1/tools/fetch |
The title and Markdown body of a given page | You already know the target URL and need its content |
- The three APIs are billed per call; see Pricing.
- API reference
- Best Practice