Web Search API

Web Search API is an API that lets AI agents and applications search the internet for live information.

Web Search API lets your AI agents and applications search the Internet and ground their responses in live information instead of relying on a training cutoff. At launch, you choose between three search providers: Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup. All three support Zero Data Retention for requests made through Cloudflare and follow verified bot crawling standards. The API runs through AI Gateway so search requests appear in your gateway logs and use your AI Gateway credits at each provider list price, or you can bring your own provider API key. You can call the service using the REST API or from a Worker with the AI binding.

Web Search API at a glance

Best for: Software engineer
Runs on: API, Web
Pricing: Billed to your AI Gateway credits at each provider list API price with no additional markup
Released: October 2026
Category: AI research tool
Website: developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post

Key features

Search the internet from AI agents and applications
Ground responses in live information
Choose between Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup providers
Zero Data Retention for requests through Cloudflare
Verified bot crawling standards support
Integration with AI Gateway logs
Bring your own provider API key option
REST API and Worker AI binding access

Use it for

Search the internet from AI agents
Ground AI responses in live web data
Query external search providers through AI Gateway

Companions

Tools that articles about Web Search API recommend using with it, each with its job.

Exa — Built to work with Exa.
n8n — Self-hostable automation with code allowed in any step
Claude Code — Terminal-first agent that handles multi-hour refactors and migrations
Cursor — Same MCP server, registered with one command.
Pinecone — Official template ingests scraped pages into Pinecone.
Qdrant — Self-hostable index for crawled docs.

Alternatives to Web Search API

Firecrawl — Provides direct web data access for AI agents with open source flexibility.
Searchbase — Independent web access with support for REST, MCP, self-hosting, and managed cloud.
Parallel — It gives AI agents real-time access to fresh, cited web context through a single API.
Apify MCP Server — Connects AI agents with over 79,000 web scraping and automation tools.
Public APIs & MCP server — Connects AI tools directly to a China market research library with no keys or sign-in.
Tavily — It delivers fast, secure web data retrieval designed specifically for AI agents.
Crawl4AI — Turns any URL into clean Markdown or typed JSON for AI models.
Moli — A lightweight, structure-first browser engine with low memory usage.
Scrape Anything by Context.dev — Extracts clean Markdown, HTML, and structured data with built-in proxies and JS rendering.
SearchCLI — Provides a stable, reviewable CLI for managing Volcengine AI search workflows.
Anakin — Zero-touch keyless start lets agents make unauthenticated HTTP calls immediately.
Meilisearch — It returns answers in less than 50 milliseconds with out-of-the-box relevancy.

All Web Search API alternatives