Cloudflare announced its Web Search API on October 2, 2026, providing a unified interface for developers to retrieve web search results for use in AI agents and language model applications. The API supports three providers: Ceramic.ai, which is set as the default; Exa; and Linkup. Developers choose a provider by specifying the provider parameter in their request.
The providers differ in cost and features. Ceramic.ai charges $0.25 per 1,000 requests and includes a Zero Data Retention policy, meaning it does not store user data, and returns results with page descriptions up to 8,000 characters. Exa is priced at $7.00 per 1,000 requests, does not offer Zero Data Retention, and returns highlights—text snippets most relevant to the query—as the result description, optimized for direct insertion into language model contexts. Linkup costs $5.00 per 1,000 requests, also provides Zero Data Retention, and returns raw search results via its fast search depth, making it suitable for agent tool calls that need quick, cited information from trusted sources.
All three providers bill through Cloudflare's AI Gateway credits at the provider's list price with no additional markup, or developers can bring their own API keys and be billed directly under their existing agreements. However, each provider's terms impose restrictions on how search results may be stored or redistributed; for example, Ceramic's terms prohibit collecting, aggregating, storing, or compiling output for the purpose of creating any database, dataset, index, or corpus.