Liner Developers

Liner Developers provides search and answer APIs for grounded AI search experiences, with structured web and scholar retrieval plus citation-backed answer streaming.

Research Tools AI Developer Tools AI Search Engine

Visit Website

Developer search APIs for grounded retrieval

Liner Developers is the developer platform for Liner’s AI search products. It exposes a Search API for returning ranked web or scholarly results in structured JSON, and an AI Search API for streamed, grounded answers with inline citations.

The product is aimed at teams building LLM, RAG, agentic, or search-driven applications that need fresh context, citation-aware outputs, or raw search results without manually stitching together retrieval and answer generation. The public pages also position Liner around speed, cost efficiency, and verifiable answers with citations.

Core capabilities

Structured search output

Returns structured search results as JSON with fields such as title, URL, hostname, favicon URL, description, and publication date.

Web and scholar modes

Supports two retrieval modes: web search for general results and scholar search for peer-reviewed literature.

Query rewriting

Automatically rewrites natural-language queries into search-optimized queries before sending them to the backend.

Localized and bounded search

Supports optional parameters for country, language, date range, and result count in web search.

Academic result fields

Adds scholarly metadata such as citation count, authors, and journal in scholar mode.

Grounded answer streaming

AI Search API provides grounded answers over SSE with inline citations and reference chunks for direct integration into answer experiences.

Practical use cases

Build your own search pipeline
Use the web search endpoint when you need ranked links, snippets, and timestamps as input to a custom retrieval or ranking pipeline.
Research academic literature
Use the scholar endpoint when your application needs peer-reviewed sources and metadata such as citation counts, authors, and journal names.
Ship citation-backed answers
Use the AI Search API when you want a grounded answer experience with citations and reference chunks delivered over streaming events.
Localize search results
Use localized parameters in web mode to tailor results by country, language, and freshness for regional products or news workflows.
Support team research operations
Use the broader Liner plans when a team needs centralized billing, admin controls, or audit logs around research workflows.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Returns structured results that are straightforward to plug into downstream pipelines.
Offers separate web and scholar retrieval paths for general search and academic use cases.
Supports localized and date-bounded searches in web mode.
Provides citation-aware grounded answers through the AI Search API.
Documents concrete request and response shapes, including authentication and error handling.

Cons

The public docs emphasize search and answer outputs, but they do not provide a full integrations catalog or broad workflow coverage.
Pricing, limits, and team packaging for the developer APIs are not fully detailed on the developer pages.
The search API returns results, not finished answers, so teams still need to build their own answer layer if they want generated responses.

FAQ

What does the Search API return?

It exposes search endpoints that return structured JSON results for web or scholarly queries. The docs describe separate web and scholar retrieval modes, with the latter adding academic metadata such as citation counts, authors, and journal fields.

How do you authenticate and query it?

The docs say requests require an API key in the `x-api-key` header. Natural-language queries are rewritten into search-optimized queries before dispatch, and the Search API returns plain JSON rather than streamed answers.

When should I use Search API versus AI Search API?

The developer pages present the Search API as useful when you want ranked links and snippets, date- or geo-bounded search results, or scholarly metadata, while the AI Search API is for grounded answers with inline citations.

Is there team or enterprise support?

The pricing page shows team and enterprise plans for the broader Liner product, with team workspaces, centralized billing, admin controls, and audit logs on higher tiers. That supports team usage, but the public developer pages do not spell out separate developer-team packaging.

What security and data controls are described?

The safety page says Liner uses data control, responsible data handling, standardized compliance reviews, and ongoing vulnerability monitoring. It also states that users can request account and activity deletion.

Quick Facts

Category: Developer Tool
Primary users: Teams building LLM, RAG, agentic, or search applications
Core outputs: Structured JSON search results and grounded answer streams
Docs endpoints: `/api/v1/tools/search/web` and `/api/v1/tools/search/scholar`
Website: liner.com
Pricing: Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans are shown on the main pricing page