I tested Firecrawl, Exa, Parallel and Claude Search on SimpleQA. Here’s what scored best

I ran Firecrawl, Exa, Parallel and Claude’s native web search against OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark to see how much of a difference the search provider actually makes.

All four were tested with the same setup: a GPT-5.4 agent using high reasoning effort, with a maximum of 20 search or extraction calls per question. The answers were then graded by GPT-5.4 using OpenAI’s official SimpleQA grading prompt.

Each provider was tested twice and I kept the better result. For comparison, GPT-5.4 without access to search scored 43.8%.

The chart shows the correct and incorrect answers for each provider.

Results:

-Firecrawl: 947 correct answers (94.7%)

-Exa: 919 correct answers (91.9%)

-Parallel: 910 correct answers (91.0%)

-Claude Native Search: 905 correct answers (90.5%)

Firecrawl and Exa achieved the highest accuracy, while all four systems scored above 90%. Claude Native search, (not) surprisingly, the worst.