Introducing Web Search API via AI Gateway

Cloudflare announced a Web Search API available through its AI Gateway, built with three launch partners: Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup. The product is aimed at a common agent failure mode in which an agent guesses a page URL and calls curl, sometimes returning a 404 Not Found when the guess is wrong. Web search instead lets an agent issue a query and receive grounded, live results.

The API injects fresh, structured snippets from the web into an application's context, which Cloudflare frames as a fix for models that are trained and then frozen at a knowledge cutoff, leaving them unable to discuss recent events, changing APIs or fast-moving news.

Cloudflare says the partners have committed to its bot crawling standards: provider crawlers must comply with Cloudflare's published requirements for Verified bots, and web search responses must include a link to the location of crawled content. Cloudflare describes these rules as requiring crawlers to identify themselves, respect robots.txt and provide the source of search results.

Pricing is offered at list API pricing from the partners with no additional markup, and web search queries draw down from an AI Gateway credit balance. Requests appear in existing AI Gateway observability logs, and users can control which providers are accessible. Bring-Your-Own-Key is supported with web search providers, as it is for model inference providers. Cloudflare says it will identify partners supporting Zero Data Retention so users know data is not retained.

Integration options include a direct REST endpoint that takes an AI Gateway authentication token and a provider name in the payload, and Workers bindings for developers building on Cloudflare Workers, where a web search call can be made in one line. Cloudflare is also developing native Server Tools in AI Gateway, with web search among the first tools planned, so developers will not have to define tools themselves.

Why it matters: developers can give agents live web context without hand-rolling URL guessing or tool scaffolding, and can route, log and pay for those calls through AI Gateway controls they may already use. Site operators get crawler behavior tied to Cloudflare's Verified bots rules and result links back to crawled content.