Andi

Where Andi sits

Andi is a free, ad-free, AI-first search engine run by Andi AI, a San Francisco company that came out of Y Combinator's W22 batch and is led by co-founder and CEO Angela Hoover. The pitch is the one every AI search startup makes — answers instead of ten blue links — but Andi has been at it since 2021, before the current wave, and it has kept the consumer product completely free with no account wall, no subscription tier, and no advertising. PCMag named it the best free AI search engine in its March 2026 update of the category roundup, the third consecutive year the publication has recognised it, which is a reasonable proxy for staying power in a category where most entrants have already pivoted to selling API credits or shut down entirely.

What makes Andi worth a serious look in 2026 is not the chat box. It is the index underneath. Andi AI now describes itself primarily as an infrastructure company: it built and maintains Trantora, a proprietary web index of roughly 25 billion pages that scores documents for meaning, credibility and quality at ingestion time rather than ranking them by how well they are optimised for a search engine. The company says it scores 450-plus data points per page. That index feeds two products: the consumer search experience at andisearch.com, and the Andi Search API at andiai.com, which sells real-time search and page-reading to developers building AI agents.

What it actually does

On the consumer side, Andi behaves like a hybrid of a search engine and a chat assistant. You type a question; Andi retrieves from its own index plus fallback sources (it routes some queries to verticals such as GitHub or Wikipedia), synthesises a written answer through an ensemble of language models, and shows source cards next to the answer so you can check where each claim came from. Beyond question answering, the interface bundles a reader mode that strips ads and popups from articles, one-click Summarize and Explain actions for any page, a go command that jumps straight to a named site or app, and drafting tools for emails, code and short documents. There is a Chrome extension that makes it the default search box.

Under the hood, the company claims 87 percent accuracy on SearchBench AI, an evaluation created by Talc, a Y Combinator-backed startup, which generates 900 questions in real time from current events precisely so models cannot be trained on the test set. The published ranking put Andi at 87 percent, You.com at 80, Google Gemini at 71, ChatGPT at 62 and Perplexity at 59. I treat those numbers as vendor-published rather than gospel — more on that below — but the benchmark itself is public on GitHub and the methodology is at least inspectable, which is more than most accuracy claims offer.

The API side is newer and more commercially interesting. The Andi Search API (version 1.6.241 at the time I checked) exposes a REST interface for search and page fetch, returns ranked results, instant answers and LLM-ready markdown, and is compatible with Google Custom Search and OpenSearch conventions so migration is mostly a base-URL change. There is a news endpoint that enumerates topics and formats. Pricing is described as outcome-based, under one cent per query at scale, with the exact charge reported in each response rather than published as a rate card.

My testing notes

I have used Andi on and off since its early consumer launch, and two things stood out in my recent sessions.

First, the source-first layout changes how I verify answers. Andi shows one source by default beside the generated text, and the answer body carries citations you can open inline in the reader. I asked it a run of factual questions with known answers from primary sources — a filing date, a specification figure, a release timeline — and the pattern was consistent: the prose answer matched the cited page, and when the underlying sources disagreed, Andi would either hedge or decline rather than average the conflict into a confident wrong number. The company says it only shows generated answers when confidence is high, and in practice that surfaces as a willingness to give me search results without a generated answer on some narrow queries. I prefer that to the alternative, but readers expecting an answer every time will find it uneven.

Second, the anti-spam stance is visible in the results, not just claimed. On query categories that are usually buried under affiliate listicles — "best surge protectors", "best budget monitors" — Andi's result feed leaned on manufacturer pages, forum threads and editorial sources noticeably more than Google's did for the same queries in my side-by-side checks. The SearchBench result is consistent with what I saw: the ranking layer seems to down-weight pages optimised for search rather than for the reader. The trade-off is that the index is smaller than Google's; on local and long-tail navigational queries I still fell back to a mainstream engine.

I also spent time with the API through the console signup. Getting a key is self-serve with a free tier, the responses return the per-query charge inline as advertised, and the markdown output is genuinely convenient for piping into an agent — the fetch endpoint saves a separate readability step. But there is no public rate card, so the only way to model costs is to measure your own traffic and read the charges off the responses. For a production budget, that is thin.

What it does not do

Andi is not a Google replacement. Local search, maps, shopping surfaces and the deep long-tail of navigational queries are all weaker than what you get from a full-scale engine. The generative layer is English-first and best at explanatory, research-style questions. There is no enterprise tier, no team administration, no compliance paperwork — it is a consumer app and a developer API, and if you need SSO, data processing agreements or an account manager, none of that exists.

The accuracy claim needs the same scepticism I would apply to any vendor statistic. The 87 percent figure is published by Andi and by Andi's press materials; the underlying benchmark is real and public, but reporting around the results notes that Andi shared common accuracy issues with the Talc team during benchmark development. That does not invalidate the result, and a 900-question live-events benchmark is hard to game by design, but it does mean I would not buy on the number alone. I would run my own query set — which is what I did.

Then there is the team question. Andi AI's public footprint is small: YC's jobs page lists a team of two, while LinkedIn shows around 58 employees, and the discrepancy is not one I could resolve from public sources. Small teams ship fast but also disappear fast, and a search index is expensive to keep fresh. The company's pivot toward the API — openly described as the commercial priority — suggests the consumer app is a showcase for the index rather than the business model.

Finally, third-party review coverage of the current product is thin. Most written reviews date from the 2023–2024 launch era, and the recent ones I found are directory-style pages rather than deep evaluations. Reliability data (uptime, support response times) is not published anywhere I could find.

Verdict

Andi is the rare free AI search product that does not monetise my attention or my data, and its results feel meaningfully cleaner than ad-funded search on the queries where SEO spam is worst. The accuracy story is credible enough to test against, and the developer API is a real product rather than a marketing afterthought. Rated 3.6 overall: the free consumer experience carries the value score, the index quality and citation discipline carry core functionality, and the small-team footprint, opaque API pricing and thin independent coverage hold the rest back. For privacy-minded researchers and developers who want a second opinion on factual queries, it earns a permanent tab. For anything requiring enterprise procurement or a guaranteed answer on every query, it is not the tool.

Sources

• https://andisearch.com/about
• https://www.andi.co/
• https://www.andi.co/about
• https://andiai.com/
• https://andiai.com/blogs/accuracy-matters
• https://andiai.com/blogs/announcement-20260219-0140
• http://andiai.com/blogs/press-release-andi-named-best-free-ai-search-20260327-1931
• https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/JC8-andi-making-search-fun-factual-and-interesting
• https://finance.yahoo.com/news/andi-beats-industry-giants-factual-130000523.html
• https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-search-engines/497061/
• https://intelligenttools.co/blog/andi-search-review
• https://github.com/Talc-AI/search-bench
• https://www.anygen.io/showcase/andy-search/index.html
• https://www.kraftful.com/case-studies/andi
• https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/andi
• https://linkedin.com/company/andisearch