Cloudflare launches Web Search API via AI Gateway with Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup

Cloudflare has introduced a Web Search API that lets AI agents pull current information from the web and ground their answers in it. The product was announced on October 2 as part of the company's Birthday Week, with search partners Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup available at launch.

Live context instead of guessed URLs

When an agent needs a live page, it usually guesses the URL and then tries to fetch it, which ends in a 404 when the guess is wrong. The Web Search API replaces that loop: the agent sends a query the way a person starts with a search engine and receives structured snippets that can be injected directly into a model's context. Cloudflare says this addresses a known weakness of models frozen at their training cut-off, which struggle with recent events, changing documentation and fast-moving news.

Bot standards and source links

The search partners have committed to Cloudflare's bot crawling standards. Their crawlers must meet the requirements Cloudflare publishes for verified bots, and search responses have to include a link to the location of the crawled content. Cloudflare says the rules give site owners meaningful transparency and control over how their content is used: the crawlers identify themselves, respect robots.txt and show the source of search results.

Billing, logs and access through AI Gateway

AI Gateway is the main integration point for the new product. Web search requests appear in the same observability logs as other AI Gateway traffic, draw down the account's AI Gateway credit balance and can be restricted per provider. Cloudflare says it will identify which partners support Zero Data Retention, and that search is offered at partners' list API pricing with no additional markup. Bring-Your-Own-Key is supported with web search providers, so teams can keep their existing provider setup.

Integration options

Existing backends, mobile apps and external services can call a standard REST endpoint, passing an AI Gateway token, a query, a provider and a result limit. On Cloudflare Workers, integration takes a single binding call, env.AI.websearch. Native server tools are in development for AI Gateway, with web search among the first; until they arrive, developers can orchestrate search as a function tool themselves. Cloudflare points to its developer documentation and the AI Playground for getting started.