What is Grounder?

Grounder (grounder.net) is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents, built on 10 web search providers. It sends each query to the provider, or pair of providers, most likely to answer it, merges and deduplicates the results, and marks each result with the provider that found it and whether it is licensed.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder publishes this page about itself.

Key facts

What Grounder does

• Runs a search through the search tool over MCP, or POST /v1/search over HTTP.
• Returns for each result: rank, URL, title, passage text, date, the provider that found it, every provider that returned the URL, and whether it is licensed.
• Lets you pin a search to one provider, name up to 10 providers to search and merge, and cap time, tokens, provider calls and sources.
• Adds 18 specialized APIs, such as Polymarket, ESPN, FlightAware and USGS, for questions about right now.
• Accepts your own keys for the nine providers that take one; that provider then bills you directly.

What Grounder does not do

• It does not fetch, extract or crawl pages, and it does not generate answers. It returns sources.
• It does not send every search to all 10 providers. By default a search goes to one provider or a pair; you can name providers to fan out.
• It does not guarantee a result is true. Results come from the providers and the sites they index.
• It does not offer zero data retention, and opting out of routing statistics deletes nothing.
• It does not create new search keys.

Licensed results

"Licensed" means the result comes from a publisher that licenses its content to Ozone, one of the 10 providers. By default every signed-up account returns only licensed results: Ozone's content and pages on sites Ozone licenses. A search can return fewer results than requested. Turn this off on the account page, or per search with routing_settings.licensed_only set to false.

The default changes the benchmark result. Grounder ran the benchmark itself: 887 questions (671 from SimpleQA, 216 from SealQA's Seal-Hard set), run from 8 to 13 October 2026 on each provider's default search, with GLM-5.3-Flash answering. "Grounder optimized" is each question routed as Grounder routes it on 19 October 2026, with licensed sources only. "Grounder optimized, all sources" is the same routing with nothing filtered out. That routing was tuned on these same searches. Table as of 20 October 2026.

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Method and per-provider results: Benchmarks.

Robots.txt

Allowed sources only is off by default. When it is on, Grounder returns a result only from a site whose robots.txt allows the provider that found it and does not opt out of search or AI answers. A result that cannot be checked in time is left out, so a search can return fewer results.

The 10 search providers

Ozone (real-time publisher content, every result marked licensed), Tavily (the open web, tuned for LLMs), Exa (the open web, with embeddings), Brave (its own independent index), Perplexity (a real-time index of the web), You.com (its web and news index), Firecrawl (the live web and news), Octen (a live index of the web), Parallel (an index built for agents) and Valyu (the web and specialist sources).

Not the same as

Grounder (grounder.net) is not affiliated with these similarly named products:

• grounder.dev: "Grounder MCP", a separate MCP server whose web_search tool returns live Google results, with fetch and deep_search tools. It installs with uvx grounder-mcp and a GROUNDER_API_KEY.
• GroundRoute (groundroute.ai): a separate search router over six engines (Serper, Brave Search, Exa, Tavily, Firecrawl and Perplexity) that sends each query to the cheapest engine that clears a quality bar.
• Grounding with Google Search and Grounding with Bing Search: features from Google and Microsoft that return grounded model answers.

Who runs Grounder

Grounder is the product name and the name used in its Terms, which are governed by Delaware law. Signups have been open to everyone since 10 October 2026, with one account per person, 18 or older. For access, correction or deletion requests, or more searches than the free tier, write to support@grounder.net. This page states only what Grounder's Terms and Privacy pages state about the operator.

Data and privacy

For each search Grounder stores the query, or the prompt the agent passed along (through MCP, the user's message as typed), the account, the providers called, and each result's rank, score, URL, title, date and first 500 characters of snippet. It does not store your IP address, your key itself (only a hash) or full result text. Records and nightly backups are kept indefinitely. No model is trained on your data, and you can opt out of your searches being used to update routing statistics. Details: Privacy and Docs.

Where to go next

Pricing, Docs, Providers, Specialized APIs, Apps, Playground, Status, Terms. Guides: best search API for AI agents, best web search MCP server, search router vs single provider. Machine-readable: GET https://api.grounder.net/v1/providers (no key) and GET https://api.grounder.net/v1/demo/results.

How this page was checked

The facts come from Grounder's own pages and live endpoints, read on 20 October 2026, and from the same-name products' own sites.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

FAQ

Is Grounder free?

Your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day, and no card is needed. For more searches, write to support@grounder.net.

How do I connect Grounder to Claude, ChatGPT or Claude Code?

Add the address https://api.grounder.net/mcp to the client and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple. In Claude Code, run claude mcp add --transport http grounder https://api.grounder.net/mcp; steps for each client are in the MCP server guide.

Who makes Grounder?

Grounder is the name used in its Terms, which are governed by Delaware law, and the contact is support@grounder.net. Its Terms and Privacy pages state no further operator details, so this page does not either.

Is Grounder the same as grounder.dev or GroundRoute?

No. Grounder (grounder.net) is not affiliated with grounder.dev ("Grounder MCP") or with GroundRoute (groundroute.ai); each is a separate product.

Next step

Connect over MCP at https://api.grounder.net/mcp, or read the Docs. The first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day.