AI systems that read the web now have two things they mostly lacked: a published price and a behaviour score. On October 17, DeepSeek opened its Search and Fetch APIs to all developers, while Cloudflare said it will grade verified bots on how they behave after they are let in.
The $0.75 price point
DeepSeek’s new APIs cost $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests. Billing starts at 16:00 UTC on October 31, 2026. Search returns ranked results with snippets of about 100 to 200 characters and longer summaries written for models to read. Fetch converts a single page to Markdown. Failed requests, empty results and timeouts are not billed.
The price is the story. Microsoft retired its Bing Search APIs in August 2025 and pushed developers toward Grounding with Bing at $35 per 1,000 calls. DeepSeek’s rate is roughly one forty-seventh of that. Brave charges $5 per 1,000 for its Search API, while Cloudflare’s Web Search API resells partners from $0.25 to $7 per 1,000. DeepSeek caps accounts at five requests per second per endpoint, or about 432,000 calls a day by PPC Land’s calculation, with an undisclosed per-domain limit on Fetch.
What the docs leave open
DeepSeek does not name the user agent its fetcher presents, does not explain how it handles robots.txt, and does not say how it calculates the authority scores attached to results. That matters because the summaries that make the product useful for agents may reduce visits to the sites that wrote the underlying pages. Comscore put DeepSeek at 2% of US AI prompt volume in June 2026, double its January share, and European regulators have already challenged the company in Italy and Berlin.
Cloudflare’s bot conduct score
Cloudflare’s trust system checks two post-approval signals: whether a bot obeys robots.txt and whether it slows down after an HTTP 429 response. The company plans to publish a trust band on its Radar service. As Cloudflare puts it, “Verify, but continuously re-verify.” The company has form here: it de-listed Perplexity’s bot in 2025.
The evidence for the move is strong. In one dataset, 39.5% of sites that disallowed OpenAI’s GPTBot still served it a page. TollBit found 15% of AI page fetchers in Europe reached disallowed URLs in the first half of 2026. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince forecasts bot traffic will reach about 1,000 times human volume within five years.
Why marketers should care
Cheap agent search changes how brands get cited or summarised. If your content is fetch-friendly, you may appear in more AI answers. But bot traffic can also load your site and distort analytics. Cloudflare’s scores are a step toward making crawler behaviour a measurable part of technical SEO.
- Review robots.txt rules and bot logs for violations before trust scores become public.
- Compare search APIs on answer quality and citation behaviour, not just price per request.
- Watch Cloudflare Radar for trust bands and be ready to adjust bot management thresholds.
Source: PPC Land
