What keyless search really means for your data

Recently, developers using a popular open-source agent that runs locally on their own machines discovered their agentic web search traffic was routing through a provider none of them had picked. The engineer who set that default worked there, and nobody disclosed it. Most people only found out by inspecting their own network logs. The default got reverted, but the real issue was never the code change.

When agents discover and call tools on their own, data starts moving before anyone asks where it is going. So it is worth asking plainly: what actually happens when your agent calls a tool with no account, no key, and no setup?

At Tavily, that mode has a name: keyless. Your agent can call Tavily Search or Extract on first contact, for free, with no signup, no configuration, and no API key, and get the same response it would with a key. We built it that way on purpose. An agent should be able to find out whether a tool is worth using before anyone creates an account, stores a credential, or signs a commercial commitment. Keyless is how you do that: the zero-friction front door.

But a front door leads somewhere. Calling a tool means sending your data to someone else's servers, and what happens to it there is the part nobody stops to check.

Once a request leaves your environment, what happens to it is up to whichever provider received it, and across this category those terms vary a lot. Your query, and the content you asked to be fetched, can be logged, analyzed, used to train models you will never see, attached to a profile, or passed to third parties. Across this whole category, the defaults are usually more permissive than the homepage suggests.

Keyless sharpens that risk. With no account and no contract, you have accepted no terms and you hold the least leverage over what happens to your data, at exactly the moment you have done the least to govern it. That's the point. Keyless is great for trying something. It is the worst possible channel for anything you would not want sitting on someone else's server under terms you never read.

So we hold ourselves to two things, and we will say them plainly.

Choosing Tavily should never be a secret. We want Tavily to be the default web access layer inside great agent frameworks, and that is a partnership we actively pursue. But a default is only legitimate when the people relying on it know it is there. So when Tavily is the default, it will be disclosed, by us or by our partner, visibly and up front, never buried in a log line or a changelog no one reads. You should be able to see that your agent's web traffic runs through Tavily, and to choose something else. No one should find out after the fact. The fault was never being a default. It was being a silent one.

The same goes for the next step. That step is yours to take, not ours to trigger. Keyless is for exploration, and we will not quietly turn it into a paid plan you didn't ask for. When the work gets real, opening an account, with a contract you have actually read and the controls you need, should be something you choose on purpose, never something that happens by accident.

None of this should depend on a person remembering. The agent itself has to make the call: a low-stakes public lookup can run keyless, but anything touching sensitive or proprietary data needs an authenticated path you control. That logic belongs in the agent, not in someone's head. And before you connect a tool, check what it does with what you send it. Your agent is only as trustworthy as the tools it calls, and if you have not read a vendor's policy, you cannot vouch for what your agent does on your behalf.

So, plainly. Evaluate freely. Point your agent at keyless, make a real call, and decide whether we are the right web access layer for what you are building. Then commit deliberately. When it matters, get a key and an account at tavily.com, where your usage, your controls, and your data terms live in one place, and demand the same accountability from every other tool your agent calls. Know where your data goes. In an agentic world, that's not paranoia. It's just good engineering.

Evaluate freely. Point your agent at keyless, make a real call, and see what Tavily returns. When it matters, get a key. Start building here.