A surface is a consumer AI search engine. You name one or more surfaces in a search request, and the API captures the answer each one actually shows a user — browser-first, from the live app — then returns it as a canonical Envelope. This page is the capability and pricing overview: what each surface is for, what it costs, and which structured-evidence layers it exposes.

​
What each surface is for

Eight surfaces are requestable today. Use the exact surfaces enum value in your request body. Every live surface returns evidence.sources; the table also flags where fan-out queries are directly observable and where brand mentions are available through opt-in Auto Extract.
Request
Fan-out column: Observed means the surface reveals its own search sub-queries, so evidence.fanOut.provenance is observed — today only ChatGPT exposes them; None means the surface doesn’t reveal sub-queries, so own-fleet captures report provenance: "none" with an empty queries array; n/a is a results page that is the search. Mentions: set the extract request field to run Auto Extract on any live surface. Without that opt-in, evidence.mentions remains null. Auto Extract is BETA and costs 0 additional credits today.
Send any value not in the enum and the request fails with 400 UNSUPPORTED_SURFACE (the message lists every valid value). The surfaces array must contain at least one value. gemini is a valid enum value but has no live capture path yet — submitting it returns 422 UNSUPPORTED_METHOD_FOR_SURFACE (see Phase 2 below).

​
Cost per capture

Each successful capture is billed at that surface’s credit rate. Billing is success-only — an empty or failed capture (provenance.surfacePresent: false) costs nothing. This table is generated from the code source of truth: Costs are per child — a search across N surfaces and M regions is N × M captures, each billed at its surface’s rate. See Credits for how debits, headers, and the credits object work.

​
Structured evidence on every surface

Every surface returns the same structured-extraction layers alongside the answer — at no extra credit cost (this is cloro parity, folded into the base capture price):

Sources

evidence.sources[] — the pages behind the answer, each with a role (cited, retrieved, or related), URL, title, and the charRanges it supports. Present on every surface. answer.blocks[].referenceIds point back at these ids.

Fan-out queries

evidence.fanOut.queries — the sub-queries the surface ran to build its answer, exposed only where the surface itself reveals them (today, ChatGPT). provenance is observed there; own-fleet surfaces report none with an empty queries array.

Brand mentions

evidence.mentions — opt-in Auto Extract derived from the answer text, including position, sentiment, links, and supporting source ids. Set extract to populate it; otherwise it remains null. Auto Extract is BETA and costs 0 additional credits today.
evidence.shopping and evidence.ads are reserved placeholders and are currently always null. See The Envelope for the full evidence shape.

​
Geo targeting at no extra charge

Every live surface supports country targeting, and supported surfaces add state and city precision — request a capture as it appears in California or San Francisco, not just the US. Geo targeting is included in the surface’s base capture rate: there is no per-region surcharge, unlike cloro, which bills geo targeting as an add-on. See Regional availability for the regions array, the supported shapes, and requested-vs-effective region reporting.

​
Phase 2 — roadmap

These are interface-stubbed or planned, not requestable today (submitting them returns 422; unknown enum values return 400):
  • Gemini (gemini) — a valid enum value with no v1 capture path yet. Requesting it returns 422 UNSUPPORTED_METHOD_FOR_SURFACE rather than a stand-in that isn’t the real Gemini experience. See Gemini for details.
  • New surfaces — Meta AI, DeepSeek, Amazon Rufus, and Grok. When they land, you request them by adding their value to surfaces — no integration changes, no new response format.

​
Discover capabilities programmatically

The live capability matrix is queryable — no docs required:
That returns each surface’s id and whether it’s live (requestable), plus a schemaVersion stamp — it does not carry per-capture credit cost. The cost table above is the source of truth for pricing.

The Envelope

The canonical shape — job, provenance, answer, and evidence — every surface returns.

Credits

What each surface costs per capture, and how billing is metered.