Staan.ai: a 100% European web search API

European digital sovereignty takes a new step forward. Staan.ai, which positions itself as "the first European search API," is now open to the public. The service is aimed at developers, product teams, and companies looking to integrate real-time web search into their applications and AI agents — without relying on American giants.

Three offers, one endpoint

Staan relies on a simple architecture: a single endpoint, JSON responses, and real-time web indexing. The platform offers three plans:

  • Web Search — starting at €1 for 1,000 queries, returns 10 ranked results (documents, news, structured data) with filtering by domain, market, and language.
  • Web Search for AI — at €2 for 1,000 queries, enriches results with additional snippets, retrieves the complete document in HTML or Markdown, re-ranks by relevance score, and has a latency of up to 1 second.
  • AI Answer — custom pricing, returns a generated response with source citations, powered by Mistral AI models, with complex query rewriting and customization.

Each offer starts with 1,000 free queries per month, no commitment required.

Designed for RAG and AI agents

Where Staan stands out is in its RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) oriented positioning. The API does not just return links: it retrieves complete documents, extracts relevant passages, scores them, and re-ranks them to provide context that can be directly leveraged by an LLM.

"We index the web so you can build with verified sources, in real time."

The results are systematically sourced — each response links back to its original document, making the system auditable and traceable, unlike the usual black boxes.

Sovereignty as a central argument

Staan highlights several European guarantees:

  • EU Hosting — data remains in European data centers, under EU jurisdiction, with exclusive EU routing available.
  • GDPR Compliance — no third-party tracking, no behavioral profiling.
  • Protection against the CLOUD Act — no exposure to US data access laws.
  • Transparency — each result is attributed to its original source.

The service relies on the same infrastructure as Qwant Search, the French search engine historically focused on privacy protection.

Up to 9 times cheaper than the competition

The economic argument is central. Staan claims a cost up to 9 times lower than competing specialized APIs (Google, Bing, Brave Search API), with a p95 latency of under 800 ms. For developers building side projects as well as for high-volume companies, this is a differentiating factor.

Why it matters

The arrival of Staan.ai fits into a larger movement: that of the recomposition of the European AI stack. With Mistral AI on the model side, Qwant/Staan on the search side, and a regulatory framework (AI Act, GDPR) that pushes for autonomy, European developers now have credible alternatives to build AI applications without relying on the American ecosystem.

It remains to be seen whether Staan's index can compete in coverage and freshness with those of Google and Bing. But on paper, the offer combines three rarely united strengths: sovereignty, price, and native AI integration.

Sources: staan.ai