# You.com: AI Search APIs, Citations and Site Access

> You.com sells web search and answer APIs for AI apps. What each API returns, how cited answers show sources, and which crawler builds the index.

You.com makes web search and answer APIs for AI apps and agents. The APIs return web results, page text and cited answers. Developers put these results into their own products, so text from your pages can reach people who never visit you.com.

## What You.com offers

The [You.com homepage](https://you.com/) presents the company as "search and inference for AI". The [developer documentation](https://you.com/docs/welcome) lists five APIs:

| API | What it returns, as You.com describes it |
|---|---|
| Web Search API | Web and news results with URL, title, description and text snippets |
| Contents API | HTML or Markdown of the pages at URLs that the developer sends |
| Answer API | A written answer with inline citations and the web results that it used |
| Research API | A longer answer from several searches, with inline citations and a list of sources |
| Finance Research API | Cited answers about filings, market data and financial news |

Developers call these APIs from their own apps, or connect them to an AI agent through an [MCP server](https://you.com/docs/agents/mcp-server). MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard way to give tools to an AI agent. You.com is also the [default web browsing backend](https://you.com/docs/integrations/gpt-oss) for OpenAI's open-weight GPT OSS models.

## How You.com finds pages

The You.com search engine has its own index. The [YouBot documentation](https://you.com/docs/youbot) says that YouBot "powers the You.com search engine". The API documentation does not name the crawler or index behind each API.

The Contents API works in a different way. It fetches the pages at URLs that a developer sends. Its [documentation](https://you.com/docs/guides/contents) says that it can return a cached copy or fetch the page again. It does not name the user agent of these requests. It also does not say whether these requests follow robots.txt.

## How answers show sources

The [Answer API](https://you.com/docs/guides/answer) returns a Markdown answer with inline citations. Each citation includes excerpts, which are the exact passages from the source page that the model used. You.com says that it checks that each citation exists in the source text and supports the answer.

The [Research API](https://you.com/docs/guides/research) marks citations as numbers, for example `[[1, 2]]`. Each number points to an item in a `sources` list.

The [Web Search API](https://you.com/docs/guides/search) returns snippets by default. On request, it returns passages that match the query (the `highlights` mode) or the full page content.

Each app that uses these APIs decides how it shows the sources to its users.

## Which bots to allow or block

[YouBot](/ai-crawler-bot/youbot/) builds the You.com search index and follows robots.txt. Its guide gives the user agent, the robots.txt rules and the checks for real requests.

The YouBot documentation names no other robots.txt token. It also names no separate opt-out for the APIs or for cited answers.

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