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You.com is a Palo Alto company that sells live web search and, as of October 2026, inference to people building AI agents and large language models. Richard Socher, formerly chief scientist at Salesforce after it acquired his startup MetaMind, and Bryan McCann, a Salesforce natural language processing researcher, founded it in 2020. The public beta opened on 9 November 2021 as a consumer search engine that let people pick sources and turn ads off. Marc Benioff had held the you.com domain since 1996 and was an early backer. The homepage in late October 2026 does not sell that consumer product. Its tagline is "Search and inference for AI." The change of customer is the whole story. From December 2022 through 2024, You.com was a conversational front end: YouChat answered in prose and attached web results, and named modes (YouCode, YouWrite, YouImagine, and others listed in the navigation above) were different jobs on top of the same search box. In November 2023 the company also shipped APIs so other models could retrieve the web. By 2025 it had stopped competing with Google, Bing, and Perplexity for human queries and started selling the retrieval layer those systems, and everyone else's agents, need. A September 2025 funding announcement, covered by Bloomberg and recorded on Wikipedia, said the firm was processing nearly a billion queries a month and had raised a $100 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation. An earlier version of this page described YouImagine as a 3D art community and YouSocial as a social network with campaign analytics. Those products are not in the company's current documentation or in the Wikipedia record, and they should not be repeated. The mode names were real labels on a search site. The social-network description was not.


You.com began as a private, customizable search box for people and became a web-search API for agents: the model still talks, but You.com's job is to fetch, quote, and sometimes research the page underneath the answer.


What it sells now

The live catalog is a small set of HTTP tools, plus an inference router announced on 22 October 2026. They share one idea. An agent should be able to ask for links, for the text of a page, for a cited paragraph, or for a multi-step brief, and get structured output back, without a human looking at a results page. That is retrieval-augmented generation sold as infrastructure rather than as a chat feature. LlamaIndex and LangChain apps are typical callers. So is any developer stack that already speaks the OpenAI request shape.

Search, contents, and answers

Search returns web and news hits with links and snippets, and it accepts the kind of operators agents actually use: site, language, location, file type, freshness, and offset. A person rarely types those. An agent will, on every step, which is why Socher's 2026 talks treat "search for humans" and "search for models" as different products. Contents fetches one or more URLs and can hand back Markdown, HTML, or page metadata, so the model is not limited to the snippet the index chose to show. Answer returns a short synthesis with numbered citations and the verbatim excerpts behind them. The excerpt matters more than the prose. A foundation model will still invent a citation if the only thing it sees is its own draft. Giving it the passage, inside the context window, is what makes the citation checkable. This is in-context use of retrieved text, not a new model You.com trained. The company describes a zero-data-retention option, SOC 2, CCPA and data-processing terms, and custom query-rate limits. Those are enterprise contract terms, not a proof that a query is "100 percent private," which is how the old consumer marketing put it. Zero retention means the vendor says it does not keep the content of the call for training. It does not mean the pages you retrieved were private, and it does not bind the model provider you send the excerpts to next. Privacy here is a setting on an API key. Read the data-processing agreement before you put customer documents, or anything covered by a deletion duty, through the pipe.

Research and finance

Research is the multi-step tool. It runs a small investigation and returns either a cited Markdown report or JSON that matches a schema the caller defined. A long job can finish in the background and be picked up later by a task id. Finance Research is the same pattern pointed at earnings, filings, analyst notes, and market news. Wikipedia dates the consumer version of this idea, ARI (Advanced Research and Insights), to February 2025, and says it was built to read on the order of 400 sources at once. TIME later named ARI one of its best inventions of 2025. The API is what that agent became once the buyer was a software team rather than a person with a Pro subscription. In October 2026 the same tools showed up inside other people's agent builders, which is a better picture of the business than any chat screenshot. Merge Agent Handler exposes nine You.com tools over MCP, including search, contents, cited answers, research, finance, and image search. The open-source builder Sim exposes eight. Paperclip, a tool for managing agents that may themselves be Claude, Gemini, or a coding agent, can call you-search, you-contents, and related endpoints at api.you.com/mcp, with a free profile advertised at 100 queries a day. The caller brings a You.com key, or uses that free profile. You.com does not, in this setup, replace the assistant. It is one tool the assistant is allowed to call. That also means a poisoned web page is now inside the agent's context. Prompt injection is a property of any research tool that fetches untrusted text and hands it to a model with permissions. The citation does not remove it.

Inference Router

On 22 October 2026 You.com launched Inference Router, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint that serves open-weight and other models and can attach the company's web search in the same call. The announcement named serving partners including Parasail, Inception, Meta, and Alibaba Cloud, offered a U.S.-hosted option, and advertised an uptime target above 99.9 percent. Socher's line, in the Business Wire release, was that search had become one of the main tools agents use, and that reliable inference should be available on demand next to it. This is a hosted inference product, not a claim that You.com trains those models. The weights still come from the labs and the hosts. You.com's addition is the contract: one key, a search tool already wired in, and an enterprise reliability story. Read that launch against the search business rather than as a pivot away from it. Agents fail in two different ways. They fail when the model is down, and they fail when the model is up but answering from last year's weights. A router that can both complete a prompt and call Search is You.com trying to sell both failure modes as one invoice. Whether the uptime number holds is an operations fact a customer can measure. Whether the attached search is better than OpenAI's or Anthropic's own web tool is a benchmark fact, and vendor slides are not that measurement.

What the consumer product was

YouChat launched on 23 December 2022, a few weeks after ChatGPT. You.com's claim, repeated on Wikipedia, is that it was the first search engine to put a large language model and live web results in the same response. YouChat 2.0 followed in February 2023, YouChat 3.0 in May 2023, and a paid YouPro plan in June 2023. The early web results were widely described, including on the previous version of this page, as coming from Microsoft Bing. That fit the era: a new search box could license an index faster than it could crawl the web. By 2026 Socher was arguing the opposite arrangement in public, that Google and Bing had tightened or withdrawn the developer APIs, and that agents needed an index whose owner wanted third parties to call it. The named modes were jobs, not separate codebases a buyer should still shop for. YouCode aimed at snippets, documentation, and code writing. YouWrite aimed at drafts. YouImagine aimed at generated images. Treating them as a learning platform, a 3D suite, or a social network overstated a row of buttons. People could also reorder source categories, including community sites, which was the "you control the search" slogan. TIME named the ad-free consumer engine one of its best inventions of 2022. The slogan did not survive as the business. Secondary writeups in 2026 say the consumer plans (a free tier, Pro around $20 a month, Max around $200, still listed on an archived pricing page in February 2026) were withdrawn by mid-year, when the homepage had become an API site. Wikipedia is softer: it says the company shifted toward enterprise and APIs, and it still marks the site as live. Both can be true. The company is live. The chat product people compared with ChatGPT in 2023 is not what you.com leads with. Perplexity took the other branch of the same 2022 idea and stayed a consumer answer engine, later adding its own computer-use agent in Perplexity Computer. Grok and ChatGPT added search beside a chat model they train themselves. You.com stopped being the place a person goes to ask a question. It became one of the places an agent goes to get a page. If you want the old YouChat behavior, use one of those products. If you are building an agent that must cite a URL, You.com is still in that market.

Company, money, and scale

The funding path is short and public. A July 2022 Series A of about $25 million was led by Radical Ventures, with Time Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest, and Day One among the participants. Georgian led a $50 million Series B in September 2024. Cox Enterprises led the $100 million Series C in September 2025, with Georgian, Salesforce Ventures, and Norwest participating, at the $1.5 billion valuation that made the round a unicorn story. Socher has remained the public chief executive. He also founded Recursive and is involved with AIX Ventures, which is why 2026 interviews about You.com often spend most of their length on automated scientific research. That second company is not this product. Do not import its claims about self-improving research systems into a description of a search API. Company materials and the September 2025 coverage name large customers, including OpenAI, Databricks, Amazon, and others. A May 2026 talk also mentioned DuckDuckGo. Treat the logos as the company's account of who calls the API, not as a measure of how much of anyone's traffic You.com carries. The nearly one billion queries a month figure is from that same funding moment. It is a volume claim about an API, and it will include agent retries, not just distinct human questions. Volume is not the same thing as an index that rivals Google's crawl. You.com has not published a crawl size, a freshness audit, or an independent recall study that this page can point to.

How to judge it

The useful test is whether the tool returns the page the agent needed, with a quote that is actually on that page, at a latency and price the loop can afford. Answer and Research add a model on top of retrieval, so they can still misread a source, drop a qualification, or follow a hostile page. Citations reduce that risk only if something in the product, or a person, opens them. Evaluation of a search API is a set of questions with known URLs, not a demo query. The company has pointed at finance benchmarks in conference talks. Those are worth reading against the Finance Research tool, and they are not a general certificate. There is a structural limit no API fixes. Search engines for humans were paid by ads and by default placement. Search engines for agents are paid per call, by the company that owns the agent. Publishers who depended on the human visit do not automatically get paid when an agent reads them through You.com, and You.com does not, in its public docs, describe a publisher-revenue program of the kind some answer engines have announced. Governance questions about crawling, robots.txt, and training use therefore sit beside the technical ones. Zero retention addresses the customer's prompt. It does not answer whether a site wanted to be fetched. Compared with building on Bing's developer API, You.com's 2026 argument is that the incumbent APIs are no longer a stable dependency. Compared with scraping HTML yourself, a supported API is less brittle and less legally ambiguous, and it can still be wrong, stale, or blocked. Compared with letting ChatGPT or Claude search on their own, You.com is what you call when you want the retrieval step to be your component, logged on your key, and swappable. That is a real product. It is a smaller claim than "the search engine you control," and it is the claim the site is actually making.

Recent Developments

Through 2025 the company finished the turn that had started with the 2023 APIs. ARI, the deep-research agent, shipped in February 2025 and later made TIME's inventions list. The Series C in September 2025 funded the enterprise search business and came with the billion-query claim. Consumer subscriptions faded out of the homepage over the first half of 2026. By autumn the public surface was Search, Contents, Answer, Research, Finance, and an MCP server. October 2026 added distribution and a second product line. Merge, Sim, and Paperclip each shipped You.com as a named connector, so agent platforms can offer live search without writing the HTTP client. On 22 October the Inference Router put open-weight models and that search tool behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, with Meta and Alibaba Cloud among the named serving partners. The company at the end of the month is an infrastructure vendor for agents. The 2022 review videos below are a record of the product it left, not a manual for the one it sells.

References

Additional Viewing

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YouTube

Richard Socher's TransformX 2022 fireside with Russell Kaplan (Scale) is the founding-era talk: privacy, an ad-free search box, and what a new engine could be before ChatGPT had been out a month. It is useful as history for the introduction, not as a description of the API company. The old page's longer blurb of this session listed healthcare, code completion, and Salesforce platform work. Those were Socher's career topics in that conversation, not You.com products. Richard Socher at TransformX 2022

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YouTube

"ChatGPT vs. You.com" is an early-2023 product tour of the consumer site: YouChat, source controls, and the gaps a reviewer saw next to ChatGPT. Watch it to see the interface this article says was later withdrawn. Feature names and limits in the video are from that winter, and several of them no longer exist on you.com. Early comparison of ChatGPT and You.com

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YouTube

"Why Traditional Search Is Dying in the Age of Super Intelligence" (Richard Socher, Scaled ML 2026, Matroid, 27 May 2026, about 41 minutes) is the talk that matches the mechanism section. Socher argues that agents need a search backend built for parameterized queries, that Google and Bing have made developer access less dependable, and that You.com's customers include teams at OpenAI, DuckDuckGo, and Databricks. The superintelligence framing is his, not a result. The operational claims about latency, accuracy, and who pays for search are the part to check against the API docs. Socher on search infrastructure, Scaled ML 2026

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YouTube

"Building Open AI Search Infrastructure for the Agentic Era" (Databricks Events, 1 September 2026, about 19 minutes) is a You.com CTO walkthrough of the research agent: how agent queries differ from human ones, why a retired Bing API matters, and how the company scores finance tasks such as FinSearch and CompFinBench. It is the right companion to the Research and finance section. Benchmark numbers in a conference talk are vendor measurements until someone else reruns them. You.com research agent at a Databricks event

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YouTube

Axios's Ina Fried interviews Socher (10 October 2026, about 14 minutes) on why You.com left consumer search once agents, not people, were issuing the queries. Most of the conversation is about his other company, Recursive, and about existential-risk claims this article does not adopt. The last few minutes are the part that belongs here: agents browsing on a user's behalf, and the business model of the web when the visitor is software. Socher with Axios on agents and search ```

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