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Brave Search API provides enterprise-grade web search access to an independent index of over 35 billion pages — one of the few search APIs not built on Google or Bing results. This independence makes it valuable for AI applications that need unbiased, diverse search results for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent tool use, and training data collection. The API recently eliminated its free tier, replacing it with $5/month in free credits (~1,000 queries) on paid plans. Search queries are
Brave Search API provides enterprise-grade web search access to an independent index of over 35 billion pages — one of the few search APIs not built on Google or Bing results. This independence makes it valuable for AI applications that need unbiased, diverse search results for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent tool use, and training data collection. The API recently eliminated its free tier, replacing it with $5/month in free credits (~1,000 queries) on paid plans. Search queries are
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.
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.
Per-query pricing with $5/mo free credits
$4 per 1,000 requests + $5/M tokens
Custom
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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 API
Fast, cheap Google Search API for AI agents — sub-2s responses at pennies per thousand queries.
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.
Web Search & Research
One secure web-access API for AI agents — real-time search, extract, crawl, and research endpoints with 180ms p50 latency and built-in PII / prompt-injection guardrails.
Pricing and features change often. If anything on this Brave Search API page is wrong or missing, tell us and include a link to the source. We review every correction.
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