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Valyu vs You.com

You.com scores higher on the AgentReady, 66/100 against 62/100. They differ on 7 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Valyu. Search and deep research API for AIs doing knowledge work.

You.com. Provider of web search APIs for AI agents and LLMs, offering real-time search, content extraction, and grounded answer generation.

Where Valyu is ahead

Valyu passes clear product positioning, and You.com does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: limits / constraints documented. You.com misses it.

And on operate, structured, predictable output. You.com misses it.

Where You.com is ahead

You.com passes structured api reference and authentication documented, and Valyu does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

It also holds adopt: agent-compatible signup flow. Valyu misses it.

And on operate, agent compatibility verified. Valyu misses it.

What neither does

Both fail openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, programmatic credential creation, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Valyu leads 100 to 87. Valyu misses nothing; You.com misses clear product positioning.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. You.com leads 46 to 31. Valyu misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented; You.com misses openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt. You.com leads 90 to 80. Valyu misses agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation; You.com misses programmatic credential creation.

Operate. You.com leads 41 to 35. Valyu misses machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution, agent compatibility verified; You.com misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution.

Pricing

Valyu starts at $29/mo and has a free tier. You.com does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

You.com clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Valyu and You.com. Alternatives to each: Valyu, You.com.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["valyu", "you"]}