There's a negative correlation between cost and performance of agentic web search tools

I thought paying more for a search API would get my agents better answers. It mostly did the opposite. I ran the same Claude Opus 4.8 agent through the same 121 search tasks with nine different agentic web search tools. Three runs each. 3,267 graded answers. The price and quality results moved in opposite directions. Firecrawl ranked first overall and passed 80 of 84 current-information tasks. Serper ranked second and cost $14.46 per 1,000 successful answers, less than half the next cheapest tool. It was also the only tool cheaper than Claude's native WebSearch baseline. The rank alone is not enough to choose a tool, so I published the task type results, confidence intervals, failure breakdowns, and the full cost calculation. If I were choosing today: I would look at Firecrawl first if current information mattered most. I would look at Serper first if cost mattered most. I would look at Tavily first if I cared most about avoiding unsupported sources. It had the lowest fabrication rate in the test but struggled with current information. Now I'm analyzing memory and second-brain tools and then lead enrichment tools after that. If those choices are part of your stack, the site in my comment has the signup form. I will send the memory report when it is ready. What category of agentic tools would you want to see ranked against each other?