Analysis
DeepSeek dated its search API opening October 17. Its official guide describes separate JSON APIs: Search returns structured web results, while Fetch returns page content as Markdown. The guide lists each at $0.75 per thousand successful requests, excluding failures and empty results from billing. Each independently permits five requests per second per account. Search-quality and anti-spam assertions remain vendor claims.
For workflow design, imagine an assistant preparing a supplier briefing. It finds candidate pages, retrieves selected material and assembles an answer. Those are separate decisions. A promising search result may justify fetching a page, but the resulting page still needs examination before its claims belong in the briefing.
My proposed checkpoint is simple: does the retrieved material support the exact sentence being written? Then ask whether its date fits the question and whether a consequential assertion needs corroboration. These are suggested safeguards, not capabilities demonstrated by the APIs. The distinction matters because retrieval and verification answer different questions.
Request accounting deserves a similarly explicit place in the design. A team could track discovery and retrieval separately, then examine what each contributes to useful answers. The supplied evidence does not establish reliability for a particular business task. An evaluation should therefore assess the resulting briefing’s support and accuracy as well as whether requests completed successfully.
Source: DeepSeek API documentation reporting · 2026-10-17 · Primary source context · attributed account