You.com

You.com today is a company that sells web search to people who build AI apps and agents. Its home page calls it "The Leading Web Search APIs for AI", and the AI search engine with its YouChat assistant is no longer something you can just open and use: when I typed a question into its old search address, and when I went to its chat page, both sent me to a sign-in page. There's no plan for regular users. Pricing is per call, in dollars: web search through its MCP server is free for up to 100 queries a day, and the paid API starts at $5 per 1,000 searches. If you came here for an AI search engine or assistant to use yourself, Perplexity or Gemini will serve you better.

That's the short answer. Here's what's left of the You.com you may remember, what I could actually use without an account, and what it costs.

What You.com is today

The pitch on the home page is aimed squarely at developers: "Search the web, extract clean content, and generate grounded answers for your agents and LLMs". The menu lists APIs, Docs, Pricing and Benchmarks, and the products are all APIs: Web Search, Contents (it turns a web page into clean text), Answer, Research and Finance Research, plus an MCP server and Agent skills. Its About page sums it up as "Making real-time data accessible for AI."

In plain English, You.com now sells the searching part to other people's AI. Your chatbot or agent asks You.com for fresh web results, gets them back in a format a program can read, and writes its answer from there. You never see You.com at all.

Where the search engine and YouChat went

There is still a door marked "Chat". It's in the Sign in menu at the top right of the home page, next to "API Platform". Without an account, though, it leads to the same place as a search: I tried you.com/search with a real question (which US federal holidays fall on a Monday in 2027) and you.com/chat, and both redirected me to the sign-in page.

The sign-in page tells you who it's built for. The email box suggests "name@work-email.com", the other options are GitHub, Apple and single sign-on, and the offer next to it is "Start with $10. Get $90 more when you verify", in API credits. That's a developer console, not a search engine for the rest of us. What the chat looks like today, and what a free account gets there, is behind that sign-up page, so you can check it yourself.

What I could use without an account: the free search

Sorry, this part gets a little technical. The one thing you can use with no key, no account and no credit card is web search through You.com's MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is how many AI assistants and coding tools plug into outside services: you add one address to your tool's settings, and your AI can search through You.com. The docs say the free profile gives you two tools, "you-search" and "you-discover", and 100 queries a day.

So I sent my holidays question straight to that free search, the way an AI tool would. It came back almost instantly with 19 web results. What you get is a ranked list of links with snippets, not a written answer, and the very first result already carried a table with all six Monday holidays of 2027, the observed Fourth of July on Monday, July 5 included. The official US government page on federal holidays came third, and most of the rest were calendar sites.

It works, and it's quick. But it's a building block for your AI, not a search box for you. If you use an AI coding assistant or an agent that supports MCP, it's an easy way to give it live web search without signing up for anything.

You.com pricing: pay per call

Here's how the pricing page lists it, in US dollars. You pay per call, and a call costs the same whether it returns 1 result or 100.

New accounts get $100 in free credit with no credit card, and the FAQ says those sign-up credits are valid for 60 days. At $5 per 1,000 calls, that's 20,000 web searches. If you run out mid-job, the API returns a payment error until you add credit, or you can turn on auto top-up.

Who it's for, and who should skip it

It's a good fit if you build an AI app, an agent or a coding setup that needs fresh web results. The free MCP search lets you try it before you pay anything, and the pricing has no minimums or seats.

Skip it if you just want to search the web with AI, chat with an assistant, or find the YouChat you used to know. The site isn't built for that anymore, and every door for regular users starts with a sign-in page.

You.com or something else?

If what you want is an AI search engine that answers in plain English and shows its sources, Perplexity is built around exactly that, although you'll want a free account before you judge it. And if you'd rather ask something right now without signing up, Gemini answered a nearly identical holidays question without an account in my review of it, sources included. Different tools, but both are made for you to use, not for your code. And if you were hoping for an AI that goes off and does the research for you, Manus is an agent you hand the whole task to, and it comes back with a finished report, slides or a simple website. Its plans start at $20 a month and run on credits. Last one: if your research starts from documents you already have rather than the open web, NotebookLM, now called Gemini Notebook, answers only from the sources you add, with a citation on every claim, and it's free with a Google Account.