# Shodan

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/shodan/  
**Website:** https://www.shodan.io/  
**APIs profiled:** 15

Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices. It continuously crawls the public Internet to build a searchable database of servers, IoT devices, industrial control systems, routers, webcams, databases, and any other host that exposes a service. Shodan provides REST, Streaming, and Trends APIs along with on-demand scanning, network alerts, notifiers, DNS lookups, the InternetDB API, and the CVEDB vulnerability database. It is widely used for attack-surface management, security research, threat intelligence, vulnerability discovery, market research, and academic study of the Internet itself.

## Kin Score — 63.9 / 100 (strong)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 63.9).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 57.4 |
| Contract Quality | 77.1 |
| Governance | 26.5 |
| Contract Governance | 26.5 |
| Operational Transparency | 50.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 89.3 |
| Commercial Clarity | 56.6 |
| Access Clarity | 56.6 |

## Agent readiness — 32.4 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | documented |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | derived |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Freemium · Self-serve signup — onboarding: self-serve, pricing: freemium, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (15)

- **Shodan Account API** — Account, profile, and API plan information.
- **Shodan Bulk Data API** — Enterprise bulk data exports.
- **Shodan CPE API** — The CPE API from Shodan — 1 operation(s) for cpe.
- **Shodan CVE API** — The CVE API from Shodan — 2 operation(s) for cve.
- **Shodan Directory API** — Browse and search saved Shodan queries.
- **Shodan DNS API** — Forward, reverse, and domain DNS lookups.
- **Shodan InternetDB API** — The InternetDB API from Shodan — 1 operation(s) for internetdb.
- **Shodan Network Alerts API** — Create and manage alerts on monitored IP ranges.
- **Shodan Notifiers API** — Manage notification providers used by alerts.
- **Shodan On-Demand Scanning API** — Request crawls of specific IPs, netblocks, or the entire Internet.
- **Shodan Organization API** — Enterprise organization management.
- **Shodan Search Methods API** — Search and lookup endpoints for indexed devices.
- **Shodan Streaming API** — The Streaming API from Shodan — 5 operation(s) for streaming.
- **Shodan Trends API** — The Trends API from Shodan — 1 operation(s) for trends.
- **Shodan Utility API** — Helper endpoints for HTTP headers and IP detection.

## Agentic access (1)

- **Shodan Agentic Access** — 51 operations · 12 acting · 1 human-in-the-loop

## Security (2)

- **Shodan Authentication** — apiKey · 1 scheme
- **Shodan Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · DNSSEC · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Shodan Plans Pricing**

## Use cases (8)

- **Attack Surface Management** — Continuously monitor an organization's external attack surface for new services, configuration drift, and vulnerable software.
- **Vulnerability Intelligence** — Quantify exposure to specific CVEs across the Internet or a defined customer footprint using CVEDB and the search/trends APIs.
- **Threat Hunting and OSINT** — Pivot from IPs, certificates, banners, and ASNs to map adversary infrastructure and discover related hosts.
- **Security Research** — Study the distribution of misconfigured services, exposed databases, and emerging IoT ecosystems across the public Internet.
- **Competitive and Market Research** — Track adoption of products, web servers, cloud providers, and frameworks across regions and industries using Trends.
- **Regulatory and Compliance Reporting** — Demonstrate visibility into externally exposed assets for frameworks that require attack-surface inventories.
- **Insurance Underwriting** — Inform cyber-insurance scoring with externally observable evidence of exposed services, vulnerabilities, and hygiene.
- **Incident Response** — Triage IPs observed in alerts against Shodan history to determine who they are and what services they expose.

## Tags

Security, Search, Internet, Devices, IoT, Vulnerabilities, CVE, Attack Surface, Threat Intelligence, Reconnaissance, Network, DNS, Scanning, Public APIs

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/shodan/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.