Backdated Search & Fetch API

Overview

The Backdated Search & Fetch API answers one question no live search API can: “what did the web know on date X?” Every request carries an as_of date. Search returns only documents crawled on or before that date, and fetch returns the article’s bytes as they were archived at that time — not today’s version of the page. The backing corpus is a frozen archive, so the same as_of query returns the same results forever. This is the same engine behind the BackSearchToolset you can declare in an environment — exposed here as a standalone HTTP API for use from any language or agent loop.

Why not a live search API with a date filter? Live APIs (Brave, Exa, Perplexity, Anthropic, etc.) filter today’s index by a publish-date field and then hand you today’s bytes — so ranking is computed with hindsight and a page edited since the cutoff leaks its later content. This API never touches the live web: it searches an immutable crawl, so results are reproducible and carry no post-cutoff lookahead. That makes it suitable for leakage-free evals, forecasting benchmarks, and defensible point-in-time backtests.

Base URL & authentication

https://search.openreward.ai

Authenticate with your OpenReward API key in the x-api-key header — the same or_... key the rest of the platform uses. No separate key is needed.

export OPENREWARD_API_KEY="or_xxxxxxxx"

Search runs over a fixed historical corpus. Choose as_of dates inside the covered window — dates outside it return no results. Current coverage: December 2025 → June 2026, news sources, rolling forward roughly one month behind real time. Confirm the live window with the OpenReward team.

Pricing

Pay-as-you-go against your prepaid OpenReward balance — no subscription.

Endpoint	Price
`POST /search`	$10 / 1,000 requests ($ 0.01 each)
`POST /fetch`	$2 / 1,000 requests ($ 0.002 each)

Only successful requests are billed. A search that errors, or a fetch that finds no capture on or before as_of (a 404), is not charged. When your balance is exhausted the API returns 402 Payment Required — top up to continue. Track usage with orwd usage or GET /v1/billing/api-usage.

POST /search

Full-text + semantic search over the archive, cut off at as_of.

Request body

Field	Type	Required	Description
`query`	string	yes	The search query.
`as_of`	string	yes	Point-in-time cutoff, ISO `YYYY-MM-DD`. Only documents crawled on or before this date (end-of-day, inclusive) are returned.
`k`	integer	no	Number of hits to return. Default `10`.
`mode`	string	no	`hybrid` (BM25 + E5 vector fusion, best quality — default), `bm25` (fast lexical), or `dense` (pure vector).
`lang`	string	no	ISO-639-1 language filter, e.g. `en`.
`site`	string	no	Restrict to a single host, e.g. `reuters.com`.
`allowed_domains`	string[]	no	Only return results from these hosts. Mutually exclusive with `blocked_domains`.
`blocked_domains`	string[]	no	Exclude these hosts.
`sort`	string	no	`relevance` (default) or `newest`.

Response

{
  "mode": "hybrid",
  "candidates": 25,
  "hits": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/article",
      "title": "Article title",
      "snippet": "first ~200 chars of article text",
      "crawl_date": "2025-12-01T17:33:40Z",
      "publish_date": "2025-12-01T00:00:00Z",
      "host": "example.com",
      "score": 0.976
    }
  ],
  "timing": { "total_ms": 587.3 }
}

Field	Description
`hits[].crawl_date`	When the page was archived. This is what `as_of` gates on — never later than your cutoff.
`hits[].publish_date`	The article’s own stated publish date (best-effort; may be null).
`hits[].score`	Rank pseudo-score in `[0,1]` (`1.0` = top hit). In `hybrid` it’s the fused score.
`candidates`	Unique-URL candidates considered before rerank (meaningful in `hybrid`).

Example

curl
Python

curl -X POST https://search.openreward.ai/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $OPENREWARD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "central bank statement on interest rates",
    "as_of": "2026-01-15",
    "k": 5,
    "mode": "hybrid"
  }'

import os, requests

resp = requests.post(
    "https://search.openreward.ai/search",
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["OPENREWARD_API_KEY"]},
    json={
        "query": "central bank statement on interest rates",
        "as_of": "2026-01-15",
        "k": 5,
        "mode": "hybrid",
    },
)
for hit in resp.json()["hits"]:
    print(hit["crawl_date"], hit["title"], hit["url"])

hybrid handles paraphrase that lexical search misses — a query for “Eastern European territorial dispute escalation” surfaces Russia/Ukraine coverage even when those keywords aren’t present.

POST /fetch

Retrieve a page’s content as it was archived on or before as_of — the point-in-time counterpart to search. Returns the extracted article text, not today’s version of the URL.

Request body

Field	Type	Required	Description
`url`	string	yes	The page to fetch.
`as_of`	string	yes	Cutoff `YYYY-MM-DD`. Returns the latest capture on or before this date.
`summarize`	boolean	no	If `true`, also return an LLM summary of the page.
`prompt`	string	no	Guiding prompt for the summary (with `summarize: true`).
`include_html`	boolean	no	Include the raw archived HTML alongside extracted text.

Response

{
  "url": "https://example.com/article",
  "crawl_date": "2026-01-14T09:12:03Z",
  "publish_date": "2026-01-14T00:00:00Z",
  "title": "Article title",
  "text": "full extracted article text as archived…",
  "summary": null,
  "host": "example.com"
}

If there is no capture of the URL on or before as_of, the API returns 404 (and does not bill the request).

Example

curl
Python

curl -X POST https://search.openreward.ai/fetch \
  -H "x-api-key: $OPENREWARD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/article",
    "as_of": "2026-01-15"
  }'

import os, requests

resp = requests.post(
    "https://search.openreward.ai/fetch",
    headers={"x-api-key": os.environ["OPENREWARD_API_KEY"]},
    json={"url": "https://example.com/article", "as_of": "2026-01-15"},
)
page = resp.json()
print(page["crawl_date"], page["title"])
print(page["text"][:500])

as_of gates on crawl date, not the article’s stated publish date. A page that was first archived after your cutoff will not be returned even if it claims an earlier publish date — this is deliberate, and it’s what guarantees no post-cutoff content leaks in.

Budget & errors

Status	Meaning
`200`	Success (billed).
`400`	Bad request — e.g. both `allowed_domains` and `blocked_domains` set, or an invalid URL. Not billed.
`401`	Missing `x-api-key`.
`403`	Invalid or disabled API key.
`402`	Balance exhausted. Top up to continue. Not billed.
`404`	(fetch) No capture of the URL on or before `as_of`. Not billed.

Checking your usage

GET https://api.openreward.ai/v1/billing/api-usage returns metered search and fetch usage for the account behind your API key — requests, billable cost, and anything metered-but-not-yet-priced (pendingRequests).

Query parameters

Field	Type	Description
`days`	integer	Window to report, 1–90. Default `30`.
`service`	string	Filter to `search` or `fetch`. Omit for both.
`granularity`	string	`total` (default) or `daily` for a per-day breakdown.

Response

{
  "since": "2026-06-21T00:00:00.000Z",
  "until": "2026-07-21T08:11:29.856Z",
  "byService": [
    { "service": "search", "requests": 1200, "units": "1200.000", "cost": "12.000000", "pendingRequests": 0 },
    { "service": "fetch",  "requests": 300,  "units": "300.000",  "cost": "0.600000",  "pendingRequests": 0 }
  ],
  "totals": { "requests": 1500, "cost": "12.600000", "pendingRequests": 0 }
}

cost counts only usage that has already been priced. Requests from the last few minutes show under pendingRequests with cost: 0 until the rater runs — so the request count is always live even when the charge hasn’t landed yet.

curl
CLI

curl "https://api.openreward.ai/v1/billing/api-usage?days=30&granularity=daily" \
  -H "x-api-key: $OPENREWARD_API_KEY"

orwd usage                 # summary for the last 30 days
orwd usage --daily         # broken down by day
orwd usage --service search

Adding credits

Top up from the dashboard — the simplest path. Open your organization’s billing page at openreward.ai/<your-org>/billing (for example, openreward.ai/GeneralReasoning/billing), choose an amount, and pay by card. The credit is available immediately. Top up via the API — create a Stripe checkout session and send the user to the returned URL:

curl -X POST https://api.openreward.ai/v1/billing/checkout \
  -H "x-api-key: $OPENREWARD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "amount": "25.00", "currency": "usd" }'
# -> { "checkoutUrl": "https://checkout.stripe.com/...", "sessionId": "cs_..." }

Check your remaining balance any time:

curl https://api.openreward.ai/v1/billing/balance \
  -H "x-api-key: $OPENREWARD_API_KEY"
# -> { "balance": "24.94", "currency": "usd" }

An org-scoped API key draws down the organization’s shared balance; a personal key draws down your own. Top up whichever the key belongs to.

Get started

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Storage & Data

Backdated Search & Fetch API

Overview

Base URL & authentication

Pricing

POST /search

Request body

Response

Example

POST /fetch

Request body

Response

Example

Budget & errors

Checking your usage

Query parameters

Response

Adding credits

See also

​Overview

​Base URL & authentication

​Pricing

​POST /search

​Request body

​Response

​Example

​POST /fetch

​Request body

​Response

​Example

​Budget & errors

​Checking your usage

​Query parameters

​Response

​Adding credits

​See also

Overview

Base URL & authentication

Pricing

POST /search

Request body

Response

Example

POST /fetch

Request body

Response

Example

Budget & errors

Checking your usage

Query parameters

Response

Adding credits

See also