Brave Search API gives agents and chatbots access to an independent web index — not Bing or Google reseller results — at $5 per 1,000 search requests with $5 in free monthly credits.
Brave Search API gives agents and chatbots access to an independent web index — not Bing or Google reseller results — at $5 per 1,000 search requests with $5 in free monthly credits.
Brave Search API is the developer-facing surface of Brave's own crawl-and-index stack, sold as a real-time web data feed for agents, chatbots, and RAG systems that don't want to depend on a Google or Bing reseller agreement (and don't want their query stream becoming someone else's training data). The product is split into two endpoints: 'Search' returns complete search results — URLs, text, news, images, and an additional LLM-context payload optimized for grounding — at $5 per 1,000 requests with 50 queries per second of capacity. 'Answers' returns summarized, completed answers grounded on one or multiple searches (positioned as a hallucination-reduction layer), priced at $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens at 2 queries per second; it's streaming, OpenAI-SDK-compatible, and citations are included. Both endpoints ship $5 in free credits every month, which makes the product viable for free-tier evaluation and personal projects. The Brave Search API is SOC 2 Type II attested, with independent verification of the security and privacy controls, and enterprise contracts cover zero data retention, full-funnel custom NDAs, and bespoke capacity for large deployments.
Was this helpful?
The go-to search API for AI developers. Independent index of 30+ billion pages, freemium pricing with a free tier (2,000 queries/month) and paid plans from ~$3 per 1K queries, privacy-first architecture, and the default choice for Claude MCP integrations. Index quality trails Google on niche queries, but the independence and cost make it the practical choice for most AI workloads.
$5 per 1,000 requests
$4 per 1,000 requests + $5 per million input/output tokens
Custom contract
Ready to get started with Brave Search API?
View Pricing Options →Brave Search API works with these platforms and services:
We believe in transparent reviews. Here's what Brave Search API doesn't handle well:
Weekly insights on the latest AI tools, features, and trends delivered to your inbox.
Brave has continued to invest heavily in the API as AI-agent traffic has become its dominant use case. Recent emphasis includes deeper MCP support and official MCP server distribution, expanded AI Summarizer coverage with better citation formatting, growth of the underlying index past the 30-billion-page mark, and tighter integrations with Claude (Anthropic's Claude Desktop and Claude Code ship Brave-friendly examples by default). Brave has also leaned into positioning the API as the independent, non-Big-Tech option for RAG and agent builders concerned about supply-chain risk from Google/Bing-backed competitors.
Search & Discovery
Serper is a low-cost Google SERP API for developers and AI retrieval pipelines, offering 2,500 free queries, paid credit packs from $50 for 50,000 queries, fast REST access, and structured JSON results across search, images, news, places, shopping, scholar, patents, and autocomplete.
Search & Discovery
SerpAPI is a hosted SERP data API that returns structured JSON from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Amazon, YouTube, maps, shopping, jobs, scholar, and other search surfaces while handling rendering, proxies, CAPTCHA solving, IP rotation, and parsing.
AI Developer Tools
a real-time search, extraction, research, and web crawling API designed specifically to connect AI agents to the web.
No reviews yet. Be the first to share your experience!
Get started with Brave Search API and see if it's the right fit for your needs.
Get Started →Take our 60-second quiz to get personalized tool recommendations
Find Your Perfect AI Stack →Explore 20 ready-to-deploy AI agent templates for sales, support, dev, research, and operations.
Browse Agent Templates →