Cloudflare launches Web Search API in beta, routing Exa, Ceramic.ai and Linkup queries through AI Gateway

Why would I use this instead of hitting Exa or Linkup directly? Does Cloudflare have to be in the middle of literally everything now?

Because billing and integration are already done for you. One invoice, one set of logs, and failover if a provider goes down. That's worth something.

Cloudflare is setting itself up as the arbiter of which requests are human, which are authorized AI bots, and which are banned. Given how much scrapers cost sites these days, someone was going to do it.

I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is the same idea, a wrapper over other search engines. Being able to try new models and new engines without a procurement fight is the whole point.

For companies already on Cloudflare it's basically a trusted main cloud supplier now, the place most of the bill already goes, so no fresh procurement process.

So they build bot detection, then sell crawlers access? That's a bit rich.

A crawler that respects robots.txt isn't the same traffic that bot protection blocks. Those are good internet citizens and they do real work.

I wonder if these three engines get into Cloudflare-protected sites without a captcha. Probably not, their own crawler doesn't bypass the protections either.

Odd that Brave Search API isn't in there, it's a better experience than Exa in my opinion. Perplexity missing is expected given how much those two companies dislike each other.

For cheap search nothing beats Gemini Flash Lite 2.5, it gives you 1000 Google searches a day for free. Flash Lite 3.x is 5k per month and then pennies per search, which is nuts.

That 2.5 model is being retired on October 20th, 2026, so enjoy it while it lasts.

All three providers promise zero data retention, but does Cloudflare itself commit to it? If not, that promise doesn't mean much.

Tried the default provider, ceramic, with a query about qwen-3.8 flash next and an rtx 5090 setup, got zero results. Same query on Google and DDG worked fine. Then I searched for ceramic.ai itself and got nothing pointing at their own site, so the index looks badly stale.

I built a zero-ads SERP on Keenable.ai and got the same pattern. These AI-first search providers just aren't usable for real lookups yet.

Kagi's API has been great for me, though it's pricey. I built it into my Home Assistant MCP toolbox and couldn't be happier.

Five years ago who would have thought searching the web would come with a price tag.

It always had a cost, it's just shifting who pays. Looks free until the bill lands.

How is Cloudflare on the front page almost every day? It's their release week, multiple products a day, and the overlap between HN readers and Cloudflare users is huge.

I don't get the value here. Competing with Google on scale, cost and complexity is enormous.

Cloudflare's entire business is scale, cost and complexity, they're powering half the web. And Codex or Claude Code need endless web searches, open models don't have a Google partnership, so the API has to come from somewhere.