DeepSeek opens Search API: tester spends $0.08 on 110 calls, finds authority scores tied to hosts
gaganghotra_ · x · 2026-10-19
DeepSeek officially opened its Search & Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 calls per endpoint, powered by its in-house search engine; calls via server-side tools in DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex stay free until Oct 31, 2026.
SEO practitioner Suganthan Mohanadasan tested it immediately (110 API calls, $0.08 total) and published early findings:
- The API exposes authority scores, reranking scores, and the exact retrieved sources — SEOs can now inspect how DeepSeek's own search engine ranks pages.
- Authority behaves like a host-level score: every page on his site scored 1/4, while a "Free Robux Generator" spam PDF on a government (.gov) host scored a perfect 4/4. Registries and app stores outranked purpose-built tools on their own queries.
- DeepSeek's claimed anti-SEO/GEO-spam protections still let questionable results through.
- The Fetch API crawler arrives as Firefox from a Huawei Cloud IP in Hong Kong, with no DeepSeek identification, and fetches URLs disallowed by robots.txt.
A significant release for the AI SEO/GEO community, warts and all.
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