DeepSeek Search benchmarked: cheapest per search, mid-pack on quality

DeepSeek Search debuts on the Artificial Analysis Search Index at 69, 17th of 27 search products, at the lowest price of any paid Search API on the board @deepseek_ai launched its Search API on 17 October. We benchmarked it in our Stirrup agent harness, where GPT-5.6 Luna (medium) calls DeepSeek Search as its web_search tool to complete a combination of tasks from BrowseComp, DeepSearchQA and AA-Omniscience. At $0.75 per 1k searches, DeepSeek Search costs less per search than any other paid Search API we benchmark, below Octen, Parallel (turbo) and Parallel (fast) at $1. At about $0.032 per task, it is the 5th cheapest of 27 products, cheaper than 20 of the other 25 Search APIs (median $0.066) and level with Nimble (lite). TinyFish, Octen, Parallel (turbo) and Parallel (fast) cost less. Key benchmarking results for DeepSeek Search: ➤ Artificial Analysis Search Index: DeepSeek Search scores 69, a 36-point lift over the same model with no search (33). It sits between TinyFish at 71 and Linkup (standard) at 68 ➤ AA-Omniscience is DeepSeek Search's strongest benchmark: it scores 70% accuracy on our proprietary factual answer benchmark. This ranks 10th of 27, 3 points behind the…