The job

Your agent has a question, but it needs to inspect the sources itself. It needs ranked links, snippets, and domains. It doesn't need page text yet, and it doesn't need a model to write an answer on its behalf.

web-search is the small paid step for that job. It returns a source list for 0.006 USDC on Base after the x402 payment. The response has the original query, ranked results, source path, and an explicit degraded flag when a recent public-news fallback answered instead of the primary search path. 

{
  "query": "recent changes to x402 discovery",
  "num_results": 8,
  "recency": "week"
}

Choose the smallest useful call

Use web-search when your next step is to rank, filter, or open a set of links yourself. Keep the same query, result count, and recency setting when you check the topic again. That makes source-list changes visible instead of mixing a changed question with a changed result set.

Choose search-content when the agent needs cleaned page text attached to the results. Choose answer-web when it needs a written response with sources. Use news-search when the work is specifically a fresh-news feed rather than general web retrieval. Those calls do more work and return a different shape.

Repeat the same source check from MCP

Use the web-probe MCP server when the agent already keeps research tools in an MCP configuration. 

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "agentutility-web-probe": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@agentutility/mcp-web-probe"],
      "env": { "X402_PRIVATE_KEY": "0xYOUR_PRIVATE_KEY_HEX" }
    }
  }
}

Call web-search with the same query, num_results, and recency fields from the earlier run. Keep the returned source list with its degraded value. That record lets the next agent compare like-for-like sources before deciding to pay for page text or a cited answer.

Account-based search versus one paid call

An account-based provider can fit a product with a standing volume agreement or a custom ranking setup. A short agent run usually needs one known input and one inspectable result. web-search has that narrower contract: the agent sees the x402 price before payment, pays once, and gets links it can evaluate before it spends on extraction or synthesis.

If the response has degraded: true, keep that field with the saved result. It means the fallback answered the request, so don't compare it to a primary result set as though both came from the same source path.