Cloudflare Opens a Web Search API in Public Beta, $0.25 per 1,000 Searches Plus a 5% Credit Fee

Telling an agent to "look it up on the web and then answer" has meant picking one of two paths. You contract with a search company, get a key, and call it yourself, or you switch on the model vendor's built-in search tool. The first path puts your search invoices and logs somewhere other than your model calls. The second is expensive: Anthropic's web search tool costs $10 per 1,000 searches, and the content it pulls back is billed again as input tokens.

On October 2, 2026, Cloudflare added a third path. It opened a web search API callable inside AI Gateway as a public beta. Three search providers are swappable with a single parameter, and the price is the provider's own list price, from $0.25 to $7.00 per 1,000 searches.

Search that writes an answer versus search that returns a list

This API does not write an answer. Send a query and you get back a result list of url, title, and description, plus metadata (the query, a request ID, and latency). Your code decides when to search and how much of what comes back goes into the model's context.

A model vendor's built-in search is the opposite. Attach the tool and the model decides when to search on its own, searches several times inside a single request, and produces an answer with citations attached. Anthropic's docs put a simple factual lookup at one to three searches and comparative research at ten or more. In other words, one request becomes ten searches.

Measured on the same 1,000 searches, the Ceramic.ai route is one fortieth of Anthropic's built-in search. The two are not the same product, though. The $10 includes deciding when to search, searching repeatedly, and handling citations. The $0.25 includes a result list. For a team that will implement search timing and result selection itself, one fortieth is a real saving. For a team that wants the model to make those calls, the two prices are not comparable.

Three providers, a 28x spread

The default is Ceramic.ai. Cloudflare's docs describe it as a proprietary web index of more than 40 billion pages designed for agents rather than people, and it returns result descriptions up to 8,000 characters.

Checking Exa's own pricing page, auto search runs $7.00 per 1,000 searches for up to 10 results, the same number in Cloudflare's table. Ceramic.ai's no-commitment tier is likewise $0.25 per 1,000. The claim that Cloudflare passes through list price holds up.

The ZDR (Zero Data Retention) column is where the primary sources disagree with each other. Cloudflare's changelog says all three providers support ZDR for requests routed through Cloudflare, while the provider docs table marks Exa as unsupported. Two documents published the same day on the same domain say different things. If your queries can carry personal data under Singapore's PDPA, the GDPR, or any other retention regime you answer to, confirm the retention terms with the provider directly rather than with the aggregator. Conditions splitting by who operates a service, even for the same underlying model, also showed up when tool-calling scores for one model varied by 30 points across OpenRouter hosts.

Who can call it today

AI Gateway is open on every plan, including Free, and the docs list no regional restriction. There is no waitlist and no approval step: top up credits in the dashboard and the endpoint answers, from Singapore or anywhere else Cloudflare sells accounts.

There are two ways to call it, REST and a Workers binding.

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/ai/websearch/" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "cloudflare web search api pricing",
    "provider": "ceramic",
    "limit": 5,
    "options": { "gateway": { "id": "default" } }
  }'

Inside a Worker it is one call.

const response = await env.AI.websearch({
  gatewayId: 'default',
  query: 'cloudflare web search api pricing',
  provider: 'ceramic',
  limit: 5,
})

Two limits apply: queries cap at 1,024 characters and results at 10. A pipeline built to pull 20 results and rerank them does not port over as written. The docs give no requests-per-second ceiling for the public beta, and no beta window or GA date.

The 5% that arrives with your credits

One cost is missing from the price table. AI Gateway credits carry a 5% fee at purchase. The Unified Billing docs state that a 5% fee applies to all credits bought through Unified Billing, with a worked example: top up $100 and you are billed $105.

The way around the fee is byokAlias, which attaches your own provider key. The provider then bills you directly and the 5% does not apply. Ceramic.ai's Pro plan is $99 per month at $0.20 per 1,000 searches with 50 requests per second, so a service running close to 500,000 searches a month comes out cheaper on BYOK. At a few tens of thousands a month you never earn back the $99, and the credit route wins.

A crawling pledge signed by all three providers

Cloudflare says all three providers agreed to its verified bots requirements, robots.txt compliance, and source attribution. The party selling search results has its crawling vouched for by the intermediary rather than by the buyer.

The same week produced a case showing why that pledge matters. On October 5, 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation published its own investigation finding that an agent it attributes to OpenAI made unapproved edits to its wikis and requested millions of pages, and that the traffic contributed to a May outage of the Wikidata Query Service. How far web access for agents can run also showed up when 900 chained links turned a GET-only sandbox into code execution. Routing search through an intermediary at least leaves which provider handled a request, and what it fetched, in one gateway log.

Cloudflare has widened AI Gateway from a path for model calls into a path for an agent's outbound calls generally. The same gateway now takes model inference, its own decision model Clef, and web search. Logs, analytics, and billing land in one place. Cloudflare has also previewed "server tools", which would register search directly as a tool in the AI Gateway control plane.

If you already have search wired into an agent, the first task is pulling the request count off last month's search invoice and recomputing it at $0.25 per 1,000. Whether 10 results and a 1,024-character query fit your current pipeline, and whether your monthly volume earns back Ceramic Pro's $99, is what decides between credits and BYOK. If you have not attached search yet, run 20 queries on the default Ceramic.ai route and look at which sources surface. Cloudflare does not disclose the language mix of that 40-billion-page index, so if your product serves queries in anything other than English, that quality is something you have to measure yourself.