Independent Web index
Access search data from Brave’s own index, which the product site describes as containing more than 40 billion pages and receiving more than 100 million page updates per day.
Brave Search API
Freemium
Brave Search API gives developers programmatic access to Brave’s independent Web index for search results, AI-ready context, and grounded answers. It is designed for agents, chatbots, search applications, research tools, and other software that needs current Web data.
What is Brave Search API?
Brave Search API is a programmatic Web search service for developers building agents, chatbots, AI search products, research tools, and other applications that need fresh online information. It provides access to Brave’s independent index of more than 40 billion pages and supports both conventional search retrieval and AI-focused workflows.
The service includes Web, news, image, video, local, LLM Context, and Answers capabilities. LLM Context returns relevant, pre-extracted Web content—including text, tables, and code—for direct use in language-model workflows. Answers produces summarized responses grounded in one or more searches and can include citations.
Developers can also use Search Goggles to filter or rerank domains, while snippets and schema-enriched results add context and structured information to returned results. The API is positioned for real-time grounding, retrieval-augmented generation, market research, monitoring, legal and financial analysis, and other workflows that depend on current Web data.
What can Brave Search API do?
AI-ready LLM Context
Retrieve compact, pre-extracted content from relevant pages, including text, tables, and code, for language-model prompts and grounding workflows.
Multiple search verticals
Use specialized capabilities for Web, news, images, video, and local search, alongside AI-oriented retrieval and answer endpoints.
Grounded Answers
Generate summarized answers based on one or more searches. The Answers offering supports grounding with citations, streaming, and OpenAI SDK compatibility.
Result controls and enrichment
Use Search Goggles to discard or rerank domains, and add up to five real-time snippets, schema-enriched results, and extra metadata to search responses.
Developer access and enterprise options
The site provides examples in Python, cURL, JavaScript, and Go. Enterprise customers can contact Brave about custom terms, capacity, or endpoints.
Use Cases
“Ground internal chatbots”
Connect a chatbot trained on internal documents to current Web information so it can handle questions about recent events, regulations, competitor news, and other material outside its private corpus.
“Build RAG and agent applications”
Use LLM Context to supply ranked, focused excerpts to agents, coding assistants, chatbots, or AI search interfaces without separately scraping and cleaning full pages.
“Automate market and competitive research”
Give research agents access to current market, industry, technology, and company information for decision support and continuously updated company profiles.
“Monitor legal, financial, and reputational information”
Track regulatory changes, filings, enforcement activity, brand mentions, sentiment, or external risk signals for legal, compliance, finance, and reputation workflows.
“Collect source material for specialized tools”
Fetch current Web results and citations for education applications, product reviews, CRM company profiles, stock-trading assistants, and similar search-enabled tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Brave Search API used for?
It is used to add current Web information to applications such as AI agents, chatbots, RAG systems, research tools, coding assistants, monitoring systems, and search-enabled business applications.
What does the LLM Context endpoint provide?
It returns relevant, pre-extracted Web content optimized for language-model use. The source describes content such as text, tables, and code, rather than only a list of raw links.
Can Brave Search API generate answers?
Yes. The Answers offering provides summarized responses grounded in one or more searches. The product page lists citations, streaming, and OpenAI SDK compatibility as supported features.
Can developers control which domains appear in results?
Yes. Search Goggles can be used to discard domains or rerank results, giving applications additional control over the sources returned.
Is there an enterprise offering?
Yes. Brave says enterprise customers can contact the company for custom terms, capacity, or endpoints. The enterprise offering lists custom agreements, invoicing, support, and a full-funnel zero-data-retention option on the product page.
Quick Facts
- Category
- Developer Tool; Search API
- Primary users
- AI developers, application teams, researchers, and enterprises
- Index
- More than 40 billion Web pages
- Documented interfaces
- Python, cURL, JavaScript, and Go examples
- Standard Search pricing
- $5 per 1,000 requests, with $5 in free monthly credits shown on the product page
- Answers pricing
- $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input/output tokens, with $5 in free monthly credits shown on the product page
Brave Search API Alternatives
Vespa.ai
vespa.ai
Vespa is an AI search platform for building search, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation, personalization, and agent applications over text, vectors, tensors, and structured data. It is designed for developer teams that need configurable ranking and distributed operation at production scale.
Voyage AI
www.voyageai.com
Voyage AI provides embedding models and rerankers for improving search and retrieval in AI applications. It is designed for teams building retrieval-augmented generation and other applications that use unstructured data.
Context.dev Answers
context.dev
Context.dev Answers researches the web and returns sourced results in a JSON structure you define. It supports fast responses for shorter tasks and ultra mode for deeper research.
Nimble Web Search Agents
www.nimbleway.com
Nimble Web Search Agents are self-learning research agents that search and crawl the live web for domain-specific answers, enrichment, and structured datasets. They are designed for teams building repeatable research workflows where the schema, search scope, and output format need to be controlled.
TinyFish
www.tinyfish.ai
TinyFish is web infrastructure for AI agents that searches, fetches, browses, and completes tasks on live websites. It helps developers and enterprise teams gather current web data, use authenticated portals, and automate browser-based workflows.
Liner Developers
liner.com
Liner Developers provides search and answer APIs for grounded AI experiences, with structured web and scholar retrieval and citation-backed streaming for LLM, RAG, and agentic workflows.