AnimeNewsNetwork vs Trace Moe

ANN's Encyclopedia API serves anime, manga, person, and company records as XML from cdn.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.xml, confirmed live with a real title lookup carrying Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *; the www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/api.php page most integrations bookmark is actually the human-readable documentation front end rather than the data endpoint itself. It's free to use with attribution, capped at one request per second per IP.

Trace.moe's real search endpoint at api.trace.moe was reconfirmed live — a deliberately broken image URL returned a proper JSON error rather than a network failure, and a real image search (a Gochuumon wa Usagi Desuka 2 screenshot) returned genuine matching-scene data with Access-Control-Allow-Origin echoing the request's Origin. It's free and keyless up to a 100-search/24-hour quota per IP (confirmed live via GET /me, not the 1,000/month figure some third-party write-ups repeat); Patreon sponsorship raises both the daily quota and concurrency.