Cloudflare on October 2, 2026 announced a Web Search API delivered through its AI Gateway, saying it lets AI agents retrieve live information from the web instead of guessing page URLs. The company said it is launching with search partners Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup.
What Cloudflare announced
Cloudflare said it is partnering with web search providers to bring what it calls grounded intelligence to AI Gateway, starting with Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup.
The company framed the product as a fix for a common agent failure mode. When an agent needs a live web page, Cloudflare wrote, it "usually just guesses the URL of the page and then makes a tool call to curl it", which it said is why web fetches sometimes return a 404 Not Found.
According to Cloudflare, integrating the Web Search API into an inference pipeline gives agents a dynamic context layer, injecting fresh, structured snippets from the web into a model's context so it can work with information published after its training cutoff.
Crawler rules for partners
Cloudflare said its launch 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 said these rules let creators decide what they want to do with their data, and described the partners as identifying their crawlers, respecting robots.txt, and providing the source of search results.
How it is billed and accessed
Cloudflare said web search queries draw down from an AI Gateway credit balance and appear in normal AI Gateway observability logs, with controls over which providers users can access. The company said it offers web search directly at list API pricing from its partners, without any additional markup.
Cloudflare added that it will identify partners supporting Zero Data Retention (ZDR) so customers know their data is not retained, and that Bring-Your-Own-Key is supported with web search providers as it is with model inference providers.
Developers can call a REST endpoint at api.cloudflare.com with an AI Gateway authentication token, passing a query, a provider and a limit, or use a Workers binding, env.AI.websearch, from code running on Cloudflare Workers.
What is coming next
Cloudflare said it is actively building native Server Tools directly into AI Gateway so developers will not need to define tools themselves, and that web search will be one of the first tools incorporated.
Until then, the company published a Workers code snippet showing how to orchestrate web search as a server tool manually, pairing a model run that declares a web_search function with a follow-up call to env.AI.websearch.
What to do
- Cloudflare says you can get started with its web search developer docs, or try the feature on the AI Playground using an AI Gateway account and key.
- For backend, mobile or external services, Cloudflare says you can POST to its REST endpoint at api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{account_id}/ai/websearch/, passing your AI Gateway authentication token as a bearer token and specifying the query, provider and limit in the payload.
- For code running on Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare says you can call the env.AI.websearch binding with a gatewayId, query, provider and limit.
- Cloudflare says developers who want web search as a server tool today can orchestrate it themselves using its published Worker snippet, which declares a web_search function tool and then calls env.AI.websearch with the model's tool arguments.
Key facts and where they come from
- Cloudflare launched a Web Search API via AI Gateway with three named partners.
We're kicking off this launch with our partners from Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup.
- Partner crawlers must meet Cloudflare's Verified bots requirements and cite sources.
must comply with Cloudflare's publicly stated requirements for "Verified bots" as defined in our developer documentation, and web search responses must include a link to the location of crawled content
- Queries are billed from AI Gateway credits and logged in AI Gateway observability.
Requests show up in your normal AI Gateway observability logs, and web search queries draw down from your AI Gateway credit balance.
- Cloudflare says it adds no markup to partner pricing.
We also offer web search directly at list API pricing from our partners, without any additional markup.
- Zero Data Retention partners will be identified.
We will identify partners supporting Zero Data Retention (ZDR), so that you know that your data is not retained.
- Bring-Your-Own-Key is supported for web search providers.
We also support Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK) with web search providers, as we do with model inference providers.
- Native Server Tools in AI Gateway are still in development.
We are actively building native Server Tools directly into AI Gateway.