Is there a search API that returns licensed publisher content for AI?

A few search APIs say they return licensed publisher content: Ozone (directly or through Grounder, grounder.net), Linkup, Valyu, You.com, Parallel and Microsoft Web IQ. Licensed-only search costs answers: in Grounder's benchmark it got 14.3% of SimpleQA right, against 97.8% with all sources.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder publishes this page and sends searches to Ozone, Valyu, You.com and Parallel, four of the options below. Grounder also ran the benchmark cited here.

Quick pick

What licensed means for AI search

A license is permission from the rights holder. A result marked licensed is the provider's statement that it holds, or can pass on, that permission for the publisher's text. We verified no license, and no provider below publishes its publisher agreements.

Providers differ in who holds the license (publisher, aggregator or API vendor), whether each result says so, and what you may do with the text: permission to cite a page is not permission to store it, show it in full or train on it. Each provider's terms set those limits. Attribution matters too: a licensed result should keep the publisher's name and link, and Grounder's drop-in endpoints add publisher_name to licensed results.

Two neighbors are often confused with licensing. robots.txt says what a crawler may fetch and is not a license (see search APIs and robots.txt). RSL 1.0 is an open standard for stating license terms in machine-readable form, including attribution and pay per crawl or per inference compensation. We saw no mention of RSL on the provider pages we read.

The law is unsettled. Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity in October 2024, the New York Times sued it on 5 December 2025, and news publishers sued Cohere, whose motion to dismiss the court denied at the pleading stage on 13 November 2025. We found no ruling on the merits in these cases as of 20 October 2026; the claims are allegations.

Options compared

Ozone

• What it is: Retrieval over news content that Ozone says it licenses from publishers. Grounder's provider list describes it as "Licensed publisher corpus: retrieval over content Ozone holds rights to." Each row has publisher, URL, date and licensed: true.
• Pricing: Not published. Its key, pricing, terms and privacy pages sit behind a sign-in as of 20 October 2026.
• Strengths: License and publisher fields on every row, a lookup for whether Ozone holds rights to a URL, and an MCP server.
• Limits: Access looks restricted: the sign-in page asked for an @ozoneproject.com address on 20 October 2026. Its own pages give different corpus sizes, so this page states none. Ozone says dates cover about 6% of its corpus. We found no independent check of its publisher list or terms.
• Pick it when: you want licensed-only retrieval and can get access.

Linkup

• What it is: A web search API with fetch and research endpoints. TechCrunch reported on 28 November 2024 that Linkup signs licensing deals with publishers and pays content partners by how often clients access their content. It gave Statista and Xerfi as examples of the databases Linkup works with and named no news publisher.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 searches at flash, fast and standard depth ($6 with a sourced answer or structured output); $50 to $55 at deep depth. New accounts with a professional email address get $20 of credit.
• Strengths: Published prices, a stated publisher program and a remote MCP server.
• Limits: Partner names, terms and revenue share are not published, no per-result license flag is documented, and its MCP server takes an API key only.
• Pick it when: you want a stated publisher program and need no per-result flag.

Valyu

• What it is: Search across the web and specialist datasets (SEC filings, PubMed, arXiv, patents), with licensed Wiley finance and health journals. Valyu says publisher content is licensed with usage tracking and revenue share.
• Pricing: Per 1,000 retrievals in the docs: open databases $0.50, web $1.50, financial data $8.00, proprietary databases $30 to $50. Its marketing pricing page gives a different range, $0.50 to $30 by source.
• Strengths: A max_price cap per query.
• Limits: Publisher agreements are not published. In Grounder's run it got 63.9% of SimpleQA right with a 5.9 s median search; that tests general questions, not its specialist use.
• Pick it when: you need papers, filings or patents with a price cap per query.

You.com

• What it is: Web and news search. knowledge=core adds structured data from "dozens of licensed providers" (the docs name CoinMarketCap, the World Bank, Sportradar and S&P Global), up to 25 results in a separate field.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 searches for up to 100 results a call, knowledge included.
• Strengths: Licensed data at no extra price and a keyless MCP profile.
• Limits: The data is market, sports, economic and company data, not news archives. Entries carry a provider credit and no URL. License terms are not published.
• Pick it when: you need licensed market, sports or economic data inside a general search call.

Parallel

• What it is: An agent-oriented web API. Its Index program (announced 19 May 2026) compensates content owners by estimated contribution; The Atlantic, Fortune and PR Newswire are launch partners. Data Connectors (23 September 2026) add Index Partners, licensed by Parallel and included by default on eligible Task API runs.
• Pricing: Search $1 per 1,000 (turbo, fast) or $5 (basic, advanced).
• Strengths: A public price list.
• Limits: No license flag is documented for Search results, and compensation terms are not published.
• Pick it when: you run research or enrichment tasks and want licensed partner data included.

Microsoft Web IQ

• What it is: Microsoft's grounding API on the Bing index. Microsoft says it combines the open web, licensed content and structured data, and supports content you license yourself. Each result carries a contentTier field: standard is available to all customers, entitled is content available through a customer's own licensing agreements, and premium is billed extra. It describes commercial access, not a publisher license per result.
• Pricing: $7.00 per 1,000 web searches from 16 October 2026. No free tier; a paid Azure subscription is required, and Microsoft's marketing page still says "Request access".
• Strengths: Passage-level results and an MCP server.
• Limits: Microsoft's terms limit caching and display, and the service sits outside its data protection addendum.
• Pick it when: you build on Azure and those limits fit.

Other routes

LexisNexis announced Nexis Data+ on 9 December 2024, an API for licensed news from over 23,000 publications (SD Times). Microsoft announced a Publisher Content Marketplace on 3 February 2026 (MediaPost). We did not check prices or terms for either.

Where Grounder fits

Grounder (grounder.net) is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents. One search goes across 10 web search providers, results are deduplicated, and each result is marked with the provider that found it and whether it is licensed. Ozone, one of the 10, searches real-time licensed publisher content, and every result it returns is marked licensed. Grounder states this; we found no independent confirmation of Ozone's publisher list or terms.

Licensed sources only is on by default for every signed-up account. On, a search returns only licensed results: Ozone's content and pages on sites Ozone licenses. A search that names no provider also asks Ozone beside the first provider. It is never filled with unlicensed results, so it can return fewer results than you ask for. Turn it off on the account page (Routing, Licensing: Any source), or for one search by sending routing_settings with licensed_only set to false.

The cost is correct answers. Percent right, with the count in brackets. The first row is what every account gets by default; the second is the same routing with nothing filtered out.

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Single providers also beat Grounder's rows: Parallel got 44.9% of SealQA right against 36.1% for Grounder optimized, all sources. On SimpleQA the all-sources row came first.

Method: 887 questions from OpenAI's SimpleQA (671) and SealQA's Seal-Hard set (216). From 8 to 13 October 2026, each question was searched once on every provider's default search, taking its top 10 results within 60 seconds. Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, at high reasoning effort, answered each question from those results alone with the same prompt every time, and answers were graded with OpenAI's SimpleQA grader. Grounder optimized is each question routed as Grounder routes it on 19 October 2026; that routing was tuned on these same searches, and Grounder ran the benchmark. Figures are as of 2026-10-20T05:12Z and are rebuilt every 10 minutes; see /benchmarks and GET https://api.grounder.net/v1/demo/results.

In this run, fewer than 4% of the results the other providers returned on SimpleQA, and fewer than 10% on SealQA, came from publishers who license their content to Ozone. That counts Ozone's set only, not licensed content in general. Grounder's pages do not say what you may do with licensed text, and this is not legal advice.

How we compared

Criteria: who holds the license, what is covered, whether results are flagged, price, free tier and MCP address. Sources are each provider's own pages, read on 20 October 2026, plus press reports for publisher deals. Grounder ran the benchmark; its method is at /benchmarks. See also the best search API for AI agents.

FAQ

Is there a search API that returns licensed publisher content for AI?

Yes, a few: Ozone (directly or through Grounder), Linkup, Valyu, You.com, Parallel and Microsoft Web IQ. Ozone and Grounder mark each result licensed or not; the others use a separate field, a tier field, or document no flag.

Can I mix licensed and open-web results in one call?

With Grounder, yes. Turn Licensed sources only off and each result still shows whether it is licensed.

Does licensed-only search cost accuracy?

Yes. In Grounder's benchmark it got 14.3% of SimpleQA right against 97.8% with all sources, and 12.0% of SealQA against 36.1%.

Does a licensed flag mean I can store, show or train on the text?

No. The flag says who holds the license. The provider's terms set what you may do. Brave's API terms, for example, bar storing results beyond transient use.

How do publishers get paid when AI search uses their content?

It varies and is mostly unpublished. Linkup said in 2024 it pays by how often content is accessed; Valyu cites revenue share; Parallel cites compensation by estimated contribution. Grounder's pages do not describe Ozone's terms.

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