Downloads of Python Packages for AI Web Search APIs Grew 26.8x in Two Years, 7.4 Times Faster Than PyPI Overall

Summary

Picture a customer who asks an AI chatbot for an emergency plumber nearby. The chatbot does not open a browser. It sends a query to a search API, gets back a short list of links and snippets, then reads a few of those pages before it answers.

Search APIs built for AI agents, plus wrappers around existing search engines, are distributed as Python packages so developers can plug them into their apps. Each install is logged by the Python Package Index, which gives a rough view of how quickly developers are adding search to their agents.

In the 21 sampled days of Q3 2026, eight of these packages were downloaded 19,645,174 times. That is 26.8 times the same days of 2024, against 3.6x growth for PyPI as a whole.

What we measured

We queried the public PyPI download log in Google BigQuery (bigquery-public-data.pypi.file_downloads), which records one row for every file downloaded from the Python Package Index. To keep the query affordable we sampled the first seven days of every month from January 2022 through September 2026, 399 days in total, and summed downloads by month, package, country, CI flag, installer and weekday versus weekend into one working table. A quarter in this study therefore means 21 sampled days (days 1 to 7 of each of its three months), not a full quarter. We removed downloads made by mirroring and proxy tools (bandersnatch, Nexus, Artifactory, devpi), which copy packages in bulk rather than install them. To control for the growth of PyPI itself we also pulled total daily download counts for the whole index from the table's partition metadata for the same sampled days.

The group covers eight packages that give code access to web search results: tavily-python, exa-py, ddgs, duckduckgo-search, google-search-results, serpapi, linkup-sdk, brave-search. ddgs and duckduckgo-search are community-maintained wrappers, not products of the search engine they query; google-search-results and serpapi are both client libraries for SerpApi. We report shares by provider family.

Search API downloads went from a niche to millions per week

Each point is the total for the 21 sampled days in that quarter.

The group was small until 2023 and has grown every quarter since Q3 2023. The single largest sample week was Aug 2026 with 7,043,755 downloads.

Free wrappers and AI-first APIs split the downloads

Shares below are download counts only. They say nothing about the quality of any provider's results.

Free wrappers and AI-first search APIs now split the market. Tavily and Exa together took 52.1% of downloads, up from 15.1% two years earlier.

Nearly half of search API downloads now come from CI

CI downloads happen when software is tested or rebuilt automatically, which often means the package is part of a product that ships.

The non-CI share was still 53.6%, so most downloads are not flagged as test runs. By IP location, United States led with 77.1% of Q3 2026 downloads across 223 country codes, which mostly tracks where cloud servers run.

What this means

When an AI assistant uses a search API, your page has to win twice. It must appear in the handful of results the API returns, and then the snippet and page text must be clear enough for the model to quote. Pages with a direct answer near the top, a descriptive title and a specific meta description tend to give these APIs better material to pass along. Winning both steps is what AI brand visibility looks like inside these tools.

You cannot see these searches in your analytics, but you can check what AI assistants say about you. Ask for a free AI visibility audit to see which questions surface your business today, then use the results to decide where LLM optimization should start.

Limits

A download is not a user. One developer, one Docker build or one CI job can download the same package many times, and a single busy pipeline can move a package's numbers sharply from month to month.

Figures cover the first seven days of each month only (21 days per quarter), so they are sample totals, not full-month or full-quarter totals. Growth rates compare like-for-like sample periods.

PyPI as a whole grew from 12.1 billion downloads in the Q3 2022 sample days to 115.0 billion in the Q3 2026 sample days (9.5x), so part of every package's growth is the index growing. We report share of all PyPI downloads where it matters.

PyPI-wide downloads in the September 2026 sample week were 38.1% lower than in the August 2026 sample week (28.7 billion vs 46.4 billion), so September figures for individual packages should be read with that drop in mind.

The CI flag is only populated in this dataset from March 2024, and it only catches environments that announce themselves as CI. Automated downloads that do not set a CI variable are counted as non-CI.

Country codes come from the downloading IP address. Cloud servers sit mostly in the United States, so country splits describe where machines run, not where developers live.

Package downloads measure developer adoption, not the number of searches run through each API.

Search APIs can also be called without these Python packages (for example over plain HTTP or from other languages), so these counts are a partial view.

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