Cloudflare launches Web Search API via AI Gateway with Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup
Cloudflare's Web Search API arrives through AI Gateway with Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup, letting agents pull live web results into context instead of guessing URLs.
Cloudflare announced a Web Search API delivered through its AI Gateway, giving AI agents a way to pull live web results into their context instead of guessing URLs. The launch, published during the company’s Birthday Week, kicks off with partners Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup.
The problem Cloudflare describes is a familiar one for anyone running an agent: when an agent needs a live page, it often guesses the URL and then calls curl, which is why fetches sometimes come back as 404 Not Found. Web search is meant to replace that guessing with a search-engine-style query, so responses are grounded in current information.
What the API does for agents
According to Cloudflare, models are trained and then frozen at a point in time, which makes recent events, changing APIs and fast-moving news hard to discuss. The Web Search API is positioned as a dynamic context layer inside the inference pipeline, injecting fresh, structured snippets from the web directly into context.
Cloudflare’s own example is its Birthday Week releases: an agent building with Cloudflare developer tools could miss new products and features without a way to retrieve the latest documentation and releases.
Crawler standards attached to the launch
Cloudflare says its partners have committed to meeting its bot crawling standards. The crawler used by a web search provider must comply with Cloudflare’s publicly stated requirements for “Verified bots” as defined in its developer documentation, and web search responses must include a link to the location of crawled content.
The company frames those rules as letting creators decide what happens with their data. In Cloudflare’s words, using web search on its platform means choosing search knowledge from operators that identify their crawlers, respect robots.txt and provide the source of search results.
How it plugs into AI Gateway
AI Gateway is the flagship integration point for the new product. Cloudflare describes it as a control plane for applications, with observability, unified billing, security and access controls built in.
In practice, that means web search queries draw down from your AI Gateway credits, requests appear in your normal AI Gateway observability logs, and you can control which users get access to which web search providers. Cloudflare has not published pricing for the Web Search API in the announcement.
The Web Search API is available through AI Gateway, and the launch partners are Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup. If you already route inference through AI Gateway, web search calls land in the same logs and billing you use today.
Related reading
Sources
- Introducing Web Search API via AI Gateway — Cloudflare Blog
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