Octen expands agent search with Pulse and a $20 plan

Octen expanded its search service for AI agents, adding the Pulse page-finding API and image search alongside a $20-a-month unlimited Web Search plan. For personal accounts, the additions pair a flat-price live-web option with a lower-cost retrieval system built to route queries to specific pages.

The Standard Search Plan includes unlimited Web Search with no overage fees and 1,000 Image Search calls a month. Octen says requests run on shared capacity and may queue at busy times. Full content, additional image searches and other APIs remain pay-as-you-go charges. Customers that need guaranteed throughput must use a separate QPS plan.

Octen made Pulse Search generally available on October 28, with lite-mode pricing starting at $0.10 per 1,000 calls. Lite mode returns a URL and title, while standard mode can add metadata, relevant passages, full content and images.

Octen’s roughly 10-millisecond figure is the median server-side processing time, or P50, for Pulse lite mode on previously unseen queries. It is not an end-to-end performance measure. Network transit, content retrieval and any answering model add time of their own.

Pulse uses generative retrieval: its model emits a two-token identifier restricted to a table of existing URLs, then maps the identifier to a page. Octen positions the system for navigational searches for familiar destinations. Pages added after training and rarely visited pages remain limitations, so the company directs fresher or broader queries to its live-index Web Search product.

In Octen’s technical paper, the company reports 59.6% top-1 accuracy across its navigational-traffic evaluation, versus 46.5% for a click-enhanced dense-retrieval baseline. The paper also says embedding retrieval performs better on rarely visited pages. These are Octen’s results, not an independent benchmark.

Image Search accepts text or a reference image. Outside plan allowances, Octen lists pay-as-you-go pricing of $2 per 1,000 calls.

The hosted Pulse API and the downloadable model come with different usage terms. Octen allows commercial use through the hosted API, but the Octen-WebGR-4B model card licenses the downloadable weights and URL table under CC BY-NC 4.0 for noncommercial use. The accompanying inference code uses the Apache 2.0 license.