We tested 12 search APIs for AI agents. Even the best one isn't enough

Telem.ai tested 12 web search providers on 363 agent searches with known answers and found the best single provider returned the known answer in its top five results 68% of the time, while all 12 together reached 84%, with most of the gain coming from adding a second provider (68% to 77%). For 14% of searches only one to three providers had the answer in their top five, and for 16% none of the 12 did. The team says it built Telem to close this gap and plans follow-up posts on provider result overlap and retrying after a miss.