Cloudflare opens Web Search API beta with Ceramic, Exa, and Linkup

An AI agent that answered from the training set yesterday can call Cloudflare's new Web Search API today and read what the open web says right now. Cloudflare announced the beta in its changelog on 2 October, and the launch reached 586 points on Hacker News on 5 October.

The API takes a query, a limit, and a provider name, and returns matching results through the AI Gateway. Three providers are available at launch: Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup. The default provider is Ceramic.ai. Cloudflare's documentation shows a REST call to POST /accounts/:id/ai/websearch/ and a Workers AI binding of the form env.AI.websearch({ ... }).

What each provider does

Cloudflare's documentation describes each provider in its own words. Ceramic.ai runs an independent web index that Cloudflare says covers more than 40 billion pages, with page descriptions of up to 8,000 characters and a focus on low latency for agents that run many searches per task. Exa runs its own index that mixes keyword and embedding search, called through its auto search type, and returns the highlighted text snippets from each page. Linkup returns sourced results with text snippets through its fast search depth, without generating a summary answer.

All three accept Zero Data Retention for requests sent through Cloudflare and have agreed to Cloudflare's verified bot crawling standards, which define how they identify themselves to the sites they crawl.

How the billing works

Cloudflare says each request is billed at the provider's own list API price, with no additional markup, against AI Gateway credits. A team already paying a provider directly can bring its own key and the provider bills under that agreement. Cloudflare's gateway logs record every request either way, so a team can see which searches an agent made in production.

What a team gets for the switching cost

A product that calls three search APIs today writes three clients and reads three bills. One Cloudflare endpoint replaces that with one client, one bill, and one log of what the agent searched for. The three providers also differ in what they return by design, so an agent can keep its code and change provider name while A/B testing cost against result quality.

Cloudflare's own curl example from the changelog asks for things to do in Salt Lake City as fall approaches, and the Workers binding carries the same shape. The documentation names the shared default gateway, so a Workers project can start calling the API without creating a new one.

Source

Primary: Introducing Web Search API, Cloudflare Docs changelog.

Reference: Web Search API providers, Cloudflare Docs. Hacker News discussion: Web Search API, 586 points.