Introducing Sift

We built Sift because every AI team we talked to had the same problem: getting clean, grounded web data into their pipelines was harder than it should be.

The typical setup involves duct-taping together a search provider, a scraping layer, a spam filter, a deduplication step, and a ranking pass — each one a new dependency to maintain, a new rate limit to fight, a new failure mode to debug.

We wanted a single endpoint that does all of that. You send a query, you get back ranked, filtered, deduplicated content from the live web. No scraper fleet. No parsing logic. No infrastructure headache.

What Sift does

Sift is a web search API designed specifically for AI applications. When you call /v1/search, the pipeline:

Processes your query and expands it to optimal search terms
Retrieves results from authoritative index sources
Scores and removes low-quality or off-topic content
Extracts and cleans full text from each source page
Re-orders results by semantic relevance to your query
Returns typed, schema-aligned results ready for use

The output is structured JSON your model can reason over immediately — no intermediate parsing step required.

Who it's for

If you're building anything that needs to answer questions about the current state of the world — RAG pipelines, research agents, content monitoring tools, fact-checking systems — Sift is built for you.

The API is especially useful when you need:

Live data — your model's knowledge has a cutoff; the web doesn't
Source attribution — citations your users can verify
Quality guarantees — filtered results, not raw search output
Structured output — JSON that plugs directly into your pipeline

Where we are

We're early. This is our first public post, and we're shipping as we learn.

If you're building something that needs live web data, we'd love to have you try it. Get API access — the Starter tier is free, no credit card required.

If you have feedback, ideas, or just want to talk about what you're building, reach out. We read everything.