On February 10, 2026, Nebius agreed to acquire Tavily for $275 million (up to $400 million with earn-outs) to fold agentic search into its AI cloud platform. Tavily still works today, but if you are choosing a web-search API for an AI agent right now, it is fair to ask what an acquisition means for roadmap, pricing, and independence, and to know your options. The strongest Tavily alternative depends on whether you need web search only or also e-commerce and social sources.
What the deal is
Nebius, a Netherlands-based AI cloud company, is buying Tavily to add real-time web access to its agent stack, complementing its inference product. Tavily brought a developer community of over a million users and strong organic, developer-led growth. The transaction was announced on February 10, 2026 and expected to close within weeks.
What it means for developers
An acquisition is not automatically bad news, but there are reasonable things to watch when a standalone API becomes part of a larger cloud platform:
- Roadmap priorities can shift toward the parent's strategic goals rather than the standalone API.
- Pricing and packaging sometimes get restructured around the parent platform over time.
- Independence matters if you specifically wanted a neutral, single-purpose search vendor.
None of this is a reason to rip out a working integration overnight. It is a reason to know what you would switch to, and to keep your integration portable.
How to evaluate a Tavily alternative
Score candidates on the things that actually cause migrations later:
- Source coverage. Tavily is web-search-first. If you also need Amazon, Walmart, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube data, a web-only API means stitching together several vendors.
- Response shape. LLM-ready structured JSON beats raw HTML you have to clean.
- Pricing model. Predictable per-request or per-credit pricing is easier to forecast than opaque tiers.
- Portability. A clean REST API plus SDKs and an MCP server makes the next switch cheap.
Options worth comparing
- Exa neural/semantic search over its own index; strong for retrieval, web and document only.
- Firecrawl crawl-and-extract to markdown; crawl-first rather than search-first.
- Serper / SerpAPI raw Google SERP data; Google-centric.
- Scavio one API across Google plus Amazon, Walmart, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, returning structured JSON with SDKs and an MCP server, useful when your agent needs more than web pages from a single key.
For a full side-by-side, see the Tavily alternatives comparison.
The pragmatic move
If Tavily works for you and you only need web search, there is no fire drill. If you are picking today, or you need sources beyond the open web, evaluate an alternative that keeps your integration portable and covers every source your agent touches. You can start free with 50 credits and map your Tavily calls to the search API docs to see how a switch would look.
FAQ
Did Nebius acquire Tavily? Yes. Nebius announced an agreement to acquire Tavily for $275 million (up to $400 million with performance earn-outs) on February 10, 2026.
Does Tavily still work? Yes, the API is operational. The acquisition is a reason to know your alternatives, not to migrate immediately.
What is the best Tavily alternative? It depends on the sources you need: Exa for semantic web retrieval, Serper or SerpAPI for raw Google, and Scavio if you need web plus e-commerce and social from one API.