Give your agent the web: search engines, connectors and free limits
The assistant searches the web out of the box, with nothing to set up and nothing to pay. When the default is not enough you can add a search service on your own free tier, or point it at a SearXNG instance you run yourself. Here is how each works and when to reach for which.
The More AI team · Updated August 21, 2026
It already searches, and that costs nothing
Web search is on from the first launch. The default engine is DuckDuckGo, which needs no account and no key — the request leaves from your own computer, so there is no middleman and no per-search cost to anyone.
For most questions that is the whole story. The agent searches, reads the pages it found, and carries on. You only need the rest of this guide when the default stops being enough.
When the default is not enough
Two situations come up in practice. The first is network: DuckDuckGo blocks requests from datacenter and VPN addresses, so on a corporate VPN or some mobile networks every query quietly "finds nothing" while your connection is perfectly fine. More AI keeps a fallback for exactly this, but the honest fix is a second engine.
The second is quality. A general web engine ranks pages for humans. Services built for agents — Exa, Tavily, Parallel — return cleaner results with the page contents already extracted, which matters when the agent is going to read twenty pages rather than click one.
- Search returns nothing no matter what you ask — usually a blocked egress IP, not a broken engine
- The agent finds pages but keeps quoting navigation menus instead of the text
- You want the agent to research rather than look one thing up
Add a search service on your own free limits
Search services live in the connector catalog under “Web search”, and adding one takes about a minute. The important part is that the limits are then **yours**, on your own account with that provider — not a quota we hand out and can change.
Exa is the easiest place to start because it works two ways. Its connector is an open server: it answers without any key at all, on a shared allowance. Paste your own key and the limits become yours — Exa gives new accounts $20 of credit, which is roughly 2,800 searches, and tops it up by $10 every month. For normal use that is free indefinitely, and no card is asked for.
- Open Settings → Connectors and find “Web search” in the catalog.
- Pick Exa and press Connect. It works from this moment, with no key.
- To raise the limits, open dashboard.exa.ai, create an API key and copy it.
- Paste the key into the connector’s “Exa API key” field — the label says “optional, raises limits”, and that is exactly what it does.
- Done. The engine now appears in Settings → Web search, after the free engines.
- Exa dashboard — create an API key — $20 of credit on signup, plus $10 every month. No card.
- Exa — pricing and free tier — What the free credit covers, in the provider’s own words.
- Tavily — API keys — An alternative built for agents, also with a free tier.
The order matters, and the default order is the cheap one
More AI tries engines one at a time and stops at the first one that returns something. The free engines lead: DuckDuckGo, then your SearXNG if you have one, then a connector you added. So a paid or metered engine is only ever reached when the free ones came back empty — your allowance is spent on the queries that actually needed it.
You can reorder the list, turn individual engines off, or switch the strategy from “fallback” to “parallel” if you would rather ask everything at once and merge the results. Parallel is faster and spends more; fallback is the default for a reason.
Run your own search: SearXNG
If you would rather not depend on anyone’s allowance, SearXNG is a metasearch server you host yourself. It has no key, no quota and no per-request price, and it is the only option where the query never leaves infrastructure you control.
Point More AI at it in Settings → Web search by pasting the instance URL. It then sits in the engine order like any other, and unlike DuckDuckGo it works fine from a datacenter address — which makes it the sturdy answer to the blocked-IP problem above.
- SearXNG — documentation — How to run an instance. Docker is a few minutes.
Search that runs without you
Web search becomes considerably more useful once it stops being something you trigger. A routine — “every morning at nine, check what changed in these five sources and write me a summary” — searches, reads and writes the result while your computer is off, and it is waiting as a conversation when you come back.
That is the part the cloud subscription pays for: the machine the run happens on. The searching itself still goes through whichever engine you configured, on your own limits.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to set anything up to search the web?
No. DuckDuckGo is built in, needs no key and is on from the first launch. Everything else in this guide is for when the default is not enough.
Why does search suddenly find nothing?
Almost always a blocked egress address: DuckDuckGo refuses datacenter and VPN IPs, so on a corporate VPN every query comes back empty while the connection is fine. Add a second engine — a search connector or your own SearXNG — and the problem disappears.
Does the Exa connector need a key?
No — it answers without one, on a shared allowance. A key is optional and makes the limits yours: Exa gives new accounts $20 of credit, about 2,800 searches, and adds $10 every month.
Will a metered engine burn through my credit?
Not in the default setup. Engines run in order and stop at the first result, and the free ones come first — so a connector is only reached when DuckDuckGo and SearXNG found nothing. You can reorder or switch to parallel if you want the opposite.
Whose limits am I using?
Your own, once you paste your own key into the connector. That is the point of doing it: the allowance is on your account with that provider, and nobody else’s quota can run out for you.