Linkup

Linkup is an AI-first web search API built specifically for LLMs and autonomous agents — the kind of plumbing you reach for when ChatGPT, Claude or your custom agent needs sourced, real-time information instead of stale model memory. We rate it 84/100 — Linkup is the best GDPR-native, accuracy-first alternative to Tavily and Exa for teams shipping production AI features in 2026.

What is Linkup?

Linkup is a Paris-based search API founded in 2024 by Philippe Mizrahi, Denis Charrier and Boris Toledano — alums of Spotify, Lyft and McKinsey. The startup raised a €3 million pre-seed in November 2024, led by Seedcamp with Axeleo Capital and Motier Ventures, and has since become one of the few European challengers in the LLM-search-API space alongside Tavily (now part of Nebius) and Exa.

The pitch is sharp: instead of scraping the open web with a hacked-together SERP wrapper, Linkup signs revenue-sharing partnerships with premium publishers and exposes that content through an API designed for retrieval-augmented generation. The result is what the team calls a sustainable gateway to the internet of AIs — fast, factual, and friendly to copyright holders.

Key Features of Linkup

• SOTA accuracy on SimpleQA: Linkup Deep posted a 91.0% F-score on OpenAI's SimpleQA factuality benchmark — the highest published number on the public leaderboard for a search API at the time of writing.
• Two endpoints, two budgets: a Standard search for blazing-fast (sub-second) answers at €5 per 1,000 queries, and a Deep search that runs multi-step, chain-of-thought retrieval for €50 per 1,000 queries.
• Source-grounded outputs: every answer ships with verifiable URLs and snippets, which makes hallucination auditing in production agents far easier than with a raw SERP scrape.
• Native MCP, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Zapier, Make and n8n integrations: Linkup's MCP server lets Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP clients hit web search with one config block.
• Trust controls: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliance, zero data retention, geo-specific data hosting, encryption at rest and in transit, and a Data Processing Addendum on enterprise plans.
• Google Sheets™ add-on: a non-technical product that drops Linkup queries directly into spreadsheet cells for analyst workflows.

What Users Say About Linkup

Sentiment in developer communities skews positive, with caveats. On Hacker News and the LangChain ecosystem, builders praise the documentation, the unusually clean LangChain/LlamaIndex bindings, and the source-diversity advantage over Tavily — Linkup's own published comparisons show 2–3× higher source diversity and lower hallucination rates on multi-hop and multi-entity queries. Recurring complaints are real, though: Deep search is genuinely expensive at €50 per 1,000 queries, the Pay-as-you-go tier offers no SLA, and small free credits (€5/month) refresh too slowly for hobbyists comparing it head-to-head with Tavily's free 1,000-search tier. After Nebius acquired Tavily in early 2026, several developers on r/LangChain and Medium specifically named Linkup as the natural EU-based successor for teams that did not want a US cloud company gating their search stack.

Linkup Pricing

Linkup's headline pricing is one of the cheapest in the search-API category — but the real number to track is Deep search, where most production agent workloads end up.

Plan	Price	Key Limits
Free	€0/month	€5 worth of credits monthly (≈1,000 standard or 100 deep queries), Discord support, no credit card required
Pay as you go	€5/1k standard, €50/1k deep	No commitment, integration support, Discord community
Custom (Enterprise)	Contact sales	Batch queries, lower latency, custom rate limits, beta features, dedicated Slack, 24/7 priority support

Who Should Use Linkup?

Best for: AI engineering teams building production RAG pipelines, research copilots, sales/financial-research agents and verticalized chatbots — especially those headquartered in the EU, sensitive to data residency, or burned by the Tavily acquisition.

Not ideal for: Hobbyists who want a generous free tier (Tavily's 1,000 free queries/month is more forgiving), teams that need built-in semantic embeddings on top of search (Exa's neural-search angle is stronger here), or anyone needing classic Google-style SERP HTML (use SerpAPI or Bright Data instead).

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Best-in-class published accuracy: 91% F-score on SimpleQA, with multi-hop wins over Exa and Tavily in Linkup's own evaluations.
• European data hosting, SOC 2 Type II and GDPR posture from day one — uncommon among US-based search APIs.
• Cheapest Standard tier in the category at €5/1,000 queries with no monthly minimum.
• Excellent MCP, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations — usually a single import and one API key.

Cons:

• Deep search is 10× the price of Standard — costs add up fast for autonomous agents.
• Free tier is small (€5/month) compared with Tavily's 1,000 free queries.
• No native semantic embeddings endpoint; teams that want vector search alongside web search still need to layer their own pipeline.
• Smaller content-partner network than incumbents — niche or non-English queries can return thinner results.

Alternatives to Linkup

The main competitors are Tavily (now owned by Nebius — broadest framework support and most generous free tier, but US-hosted), Exa (neural-search-first, raised $85M Series B and shipped Exa Fast/Auto/Deep), and traditional SERP APIs like SerpAPI or Bright Data for teams who specifically want raw Google results rather than AI-shaped answers. For most agent builders, the choice in 2026 is Linkup vs Tavily vs Exa, and Linkup's pitch is accuracy + EU posture + price.

Verdict: Is Linkup Worth It?

Yes — if you're building an AI agent or RAG product where source quality, hallucination rate and EU compliance matter more than the cheapest free tier, Linkup is the search API to beat in 2026. The 91% SimpleQA score is not marketing fluff; it lines up with what production teams report on multi-hop research workloads. The Deep-search price is the only real friction, and Linkup is openly working on cheaper batch options for high-volume customers. We rate it 84/100 — premium, focused, and the most credible European bet against Tavily and Exa.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Linkup free?

Linkup has a free tier with €5 worth of credits per month — roughly 1,000 standard queries or 100 deep queries. Paid usage starts at €5 per 1,000 standard queries on a pay-as-you-go basis.

What platforms does Linkup support?

Linkup is API-first and works anywhere you can make HTTPS calls. It ships native integrations and SDKs for LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Claude Desktop, Cursor, Zapier, Make, n8n, and a Google Sheets™ add-on.

How does Linkup compare to Tavily and Exa?

Linkup leads on published SimpleQA accuracy (91% F-score) and is GDPR-native and EU-hosted. Tavily — now owned by Nebius — has a more generous free tier and the broadest framework support. Exa leads on neural/semantic search and has a larger Series B war chest. Most teams choose Linkup for accuracy and data residency.

Is Linkup open source?

The Linkup search engine itself is proprietary, but the team open-sources its evaluation harness for SimpleQA on GitHub at LinkupPlatform/eval-simpleQA so customers can reproduce the benchmark numbers.

Is Linkup GDPR compliant?

Yes — Linkup is built in France, hosts data in EU regions, is SOC 2 Type II certified, supports zero-data-retention configurations, and signs a Data Processing Addendum with enterprise customers.