Search Modes

Configure the Search API mode for your use case

For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://docs.parallel.ai/llms.txt. The full text of all docs is at https://docs.parallel.ai/llms-full.txt. You may also fetch any page as Markdown by appending .md to its URL or sending Accept: text/markdown.

Search offers four modes, in order of latency. Use turbo for the lowest latency and cost in real-time, high-volume workloads; fast for high-quality, sub-second search across most agent workloads; basic for quick retrieval with extended snippets per result; and advanced for the highest-quality, multi-hop results. If mode isn’t set, requests default to advanced.

Not sure which mode to pick? Start with fast. It delivers high-quality results in around 700ms and is the right choice for most agents. Reach for turbo when latency and cost matter most for simple, high-volume lookups, basic when you want extended snippets and can spend around a second per call, and advanced when result quality matters more than latency.

Available modes

Mode	What it does	Latency	Cost	Best for
turbo	Lowest latency and cost; built to ground every call.	~250ms	$1 per 1,000 requests	Latency-sensitive, high-volume workloads (e.g. chat, web search tools, RAG pre-filtering, high-volume lookups)
fast	High-quality search with sub-second latency. Recommended default for most agents.	~700ms	$1 per 1,000 requests	Most agents: interactive assistants, tool-calling loops, and any workload that needs quality results without multi-second latency
basic	Returns extended snippets per result for richer per-call context. Works best with 2-3 high-quality search_queries.	~1s	$5 per 1,000 requests	Agents that benefit from longer excerpts per source in a single call
advanced (default)	Uses a more advanced retrieval and compression pipeline for higher-quality results.	~3s	$5 per 1,000 requests	Multi-hop background agents that can tolerate extra latency for better depth and cost-efficiency (e.g., code review agents, deep research)

Turbo currently supports English and Japanese-language queries. For broader multilingual coverage, use basic or advanced.

Example

Switching modes is a single parameter change. The rest of your request stays the same:

{
  "mode": "fast",
  "objective": "What is the current price of NVIDIA stock?",
  "search_queries": ["NVIDIA stock price", "NVDA quote today"]
}