Understanding Valyu’s architecture, intended use cases, and design principles
Valyu is built on a fundamental belief: AI systems need access to comprehensive, authoritative knowledge to deliver factual, reliable outputs. It is designed to return the most contextually relevant information to the user’s query. This page explains our design decisions and what Valyu excels at.
Valyu is engineered from the ground up for AI agents and LLMs, not adapted from traditional search engines.What this means:
Semantic understanding over keyword matching
Structured JSON responses optimized for LLM consumption
Embedding-powered retrieval that understands context and intent
RAG-optimized result formatting with citations and metadata
Why it matters:
Traditional search APIs return links designed for human browsing. Valyu returns structured agent-ready data that reduces hallucinations and improves factual grounding in AI responses.
Valyu unifies multiple authoritative data sources into a single search interface.Our knowledge sources:
Real-time web search for current events and trending topics
Academic papers and journals for research-backed insights
Books and literary content for comprehensive domain knowledge
Financial market data for real-time economic information
Proprietary datasets for specialized industry knowledge
Design rationale:
AI agents need diverse, authoritative sources to provide complete answers. Rather than forcing developers to integrate multiple APIs, Valyu provides one comprehensive retrieval layer that spans the entire knowledge spectrum. It identifies user intent, searches for and returns the most relevant content.
Source-specific pricing - premium sources cost more, but you choose when to use them
Philosophy:
Developers should have complete control over their search costs without sacrificing result quality. Valyu’s transparent pricing model lets you optimize for your specific use case and budget.
Core philosophy:
Rather than trying to solve every agentic search use case, Valyu provides precise, comprehensive search capabilities that developers can compose into domain-specific workflows tailored to their exact needs.