AiCostCompare

GPT-4o Search Preview

by OpenAI · openai/gpt-4o-search-preview · #269 cheapest of 325 paid models

Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC · refreshed hourly

GPT-4o Search Previewis a specialized model for web search in Chat Completions. It is trained to understand and execute web search queries.

Compare vs:Claude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 4.6Claude Haiku 4.5Gemini 3.6 Flash

Pricing

Input

$2.50

per 1M tokens

Output

$10.00

per 1M tokens

Blended (3:1)

$4.38

3 input : 1 output

Cache read

per 1M cached tokens

Cache write

per 1M tokens

Cache & batch economics

Effective prices for GPT-4o Search Preview (no cache-read rate published — hits billed as normal input).

Cache hit rateEffective blended $/1MExample request*vs no cache
0%$4.38$0.265
50%$4.38$0.265−0%
90%$4.38$0.265−0%

*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates for this provider’s batch API. Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.

What a request costs

WorkloadInput tokensOutput tokensCost / requestCost / 1K requests
Short chat message500300$0.00425$4.25
Document summary8,0001,000$0.03$30.00
Codebase question (RAG)30,0002,000$0.095$95.00
Long-context analysis150,0005,000$0.425$425.00

Specs

Context window

128K

tokens

Max output

16K

tokens

Input modalities

text

Tokenizer

GPT