Quick Answer
Enterprise AI Document Search Technology Providers 2026
The short answer
Decide first who is searching: employees across workplace apps, or users inside your own product. That splits the market in two. Prices are from vendor pricing pages on October 28, 2026.
Workplace AI search (per seat):
- Microsoft 365 Copilot — best when documents live in SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams. Copilot Business add-on $18 per user per month on annual billing (discounted from $21 through December 31, 2026; $25.20 month-to-month), or bundled in Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.
- Glean — best for search across many SaaS tools at once, with agents on top. Pricing by demo and quote.
- Amazon Quick — best for AWS-centred companies that want search, research and dashboards in one: Free, Plus $20 per user per month (annual), Professional $20 and Enterprise $40 per user per month plus a $250 infrastructure fee per account.
Search you build into a product (per query or resource):
- Google Agent Search (formerly Vertex AI Search) — the most complete managed API: $1.50 per 1,000 Standard queries, $4.00 Enterprise including core generative answers, +$4.00 for Advanced Generative Answers; 10,000 free queries a month per account.
- Elastic Cloud Serverless — best when you want full control of ranking and hybrid search: search from $0.09 per VCU-hour, ingest from $0.14, storage from $0.047 per GB-month.
- Cloudflare AI Search — the cheapest managed RAG to start: billing begins November 1, 2026 with 5 million ingestion tokens, 10 GB-month and 1,000 semantic queries free each month.
This page is the search spoke of our best enterprise AI OCR and document processing vendors guide: extraction gets text out of documents, search gets the right document to the right person.
The comparison
| Provider | Model | Where documents come from | Permissions | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Per seat | Microsoft Graph (files, mail, meetings, chats); connectors | Inherits Microsoft 365 security and compliance policies | $18–$25.20/user/month add-on (Business) |
| Glean | Per seat | 100+ SaaS connectors | Indexed with source permissions | By quote |
| Amazon Quick | Per seat | Email, messaging, local files, connected apps | Admin controls, RBAC, SSO on Professional/Enterprise | $0 / $20 / $100 / $40 + $250 |
| Google Agent Search | Per query | Cloud Storage, BigQuery, websites, connectors | You configure access control | $1.50–$4.00 per 1,000 queries (+$4 advanced answers) |
| Elastic Serverless | Per resource | Anything you ingest | Document- and field-level security | From $0.09/VCU-hour search |
| Cloudflare AI Search | Per usage | R2 buckets, websites, uploads (OCR included) | Metadata filters you define | $0.75/M ingestion tokens; $0.75 per 1,000 semantic queries |
What enterprise buyers should test
- Permission trimming. Search for a document only some testers may see. A result that leaks a title or a snippet is a fail.
- Freshness. Edit a document and time how long until search reflects it.
- Scanned files. Many archives are images; Cloudflare AI Search includes OCR billed as image-processing tokens ($0.50 per million on top of ingestion). For heavy scanning, extract first with a dedicated tool from our best OCR and document extraction APIs.
- Answer citations. Every generated answer should link to the passage it used, so employees can check it.
- Cost at your real volume. Per-seat pricing wins when most staff search daily; per-query pricing wins for occasional use or a customer portal.
Picks by situation
- Microsoft 365 company, 50–300 staff: Microsoft 365 Copilot Business; the discounted $18 annual rate lasts through December 31, 2026.
- Mixed SaaS estate (Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Salesforce): Glean, or Amazon Quick if you are AWS-first.
- Search inside your product, Google Cloud: Agent Search Standard, adding Enterprise for generative answers.
- Engineering team that wants control of ranking: Elastic Serverless with a reranker; see best reranker models.
- Small team, website or docs search with RAG: Cloudflare AI Search.
For the architecture behind these products, see knowledge layer for large language models.
Last verified: October 28, 2026.