AIBRIEF
Volcano Engine now sells the search function from ByteDance's consumer chatbot to developers, returning structured records that Perplexity, Tavily, Exa, and Brave already ship.
ByteDance's consumer chatbot Doubao has lost its search bar. Volcano Engine, the company's cloud arm, has pulled the search function out of the chat app and resold it to developers as a standalone API built for AI agents. The product is not a list of links: each call returns three records tagged with source name, a vendor-defined "authority rating," publish time, a question-anchored summary, and a Markdown excerpt of the original page. (qbitai launch coverage, Volcano docs)
That shape, structured material an agent can quote or feed into the next step, is the new product layer. Developers reach it three ways: a REST API, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), or a packaged Skill installed with the official command npx skills add https://skills.volces.com/skills/bytedance/agentkit-samples -s byted-web-search --agent openclaw. (SkillHub listing, Volcano pricing)
Pricing: 500 free calls a month, then pay-as-you-go or a monthly subscription. Volcano is the first major Chinese cloud to package "search for agents" as a discrete SKU; the same niche overseas is occupied by Perplexity, Tavily, Exa, and Brave Search.
What the launch coverage does not show: the "authority rating" is Volcano's own label, and the three demo queries were chosen and run on Volcano's own stack. Read it as one more entrant defining what an agent-grade search endpoint should look like, not an independent benchmark.