Search Embedded in Every Product
Product manager at Ecosia on building AI-powered summaries with search
Web search is becoming a default capability, not a standalone product category. The strategic shift is that search is moving down the stack, into APIs that other products call behind the scenes, which means most end products will treat web retrieval the way they treat payments or maps today, as infrastructure. That pushes durable value away from basic search access and toward distribution, workflow fit, proprietary data access, and cost efficient routing of when to search at all.
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The clearest evidence is bundling by model platforms. OpenAI exposes web search as a built in Responses API tool. Google offers Grounding with Google Search in Gemini. Microsoft offers Bing grounding in Azure AI Agents. Once search ships inside the model platform, every app team can add it without buying a separate search product first.
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Application teams already treat provider choice as swappable. Ecosia said search quality across Exa, Parallel, and Tavily had largely converged, and kept its architecture flexible to avoid lock in. Cohere similarly moved from Brave to Tavily mainly because Tavily returned ready to use text for LLM grounding, not because of a dramatic quality gap.
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That does not make search infrastructure worthless. It changes what matters. Exa argues the hard part is better retrieval, not just scaling. Brave has turned its independent index into an API business for LLM developers. Tavily is moving up stack from raw search to managed research endpoints. The winners are likely the providers that either own scarce data or package search into a faster developer workflow.
Over the next few years, most software will quietly gain a search calling agent for the moments when the model needs fresh facts, citations, or multi step research. The market will split in two. Bundled search will cover the mass market, while specialists will win where they offer better domain data, better economics, or a product surface that turns raw web retrieval into finished work.