What Role Does a Search API Play in AI/RAG Workflows?

RAG systems need good retrieval before they can generate useful answers. Most examples focus on vector databases, embeddings, and chunking. Those are important, but there is another layer that often gets overlooked: How do you find fresh, relevant web sources in the first place? That is where a Search API can help. In an AI or RAG workflow, a Search API is usually used before crawling, embedding, or summarizing. It can provide structured search results for a user query, topic, company, product,