Cloudflare opens a Web Search API inside AI Gateway

Cloudflare has added a web search product to its AI Gateway, giving agents a way to look things up instead of guessing a URL and curling it. The company says the API is available now, launching with the search providers Ceramic.ai, Exa and Linkup.

Fresh results, straight into context

Cloudflare's argument is that a model frozen at its training cut-off cannot answer questions about anything that happened afterwards, so the fix is to inject fresh, structured snippets from the web into the context window. It offers its own Birthday Week as the example: an agent working with Cloudflare's developer tools will miss the week's releases unless it can search for them.

Billing and logs through AI Gateway

AI Gateway is the integration point, which matters as much as the search itself. Requests show up in the same observability logs as model traffic, draw down from the same AI Gateway credit balance, and inherit the gateway's access controls and unified billing. Cloudflare says it will flag providers that support zero data retention, and that bring-your-own-key works with search providers exactly as it does with inference providers.

Developers can query a REST endpoint directly, passing an AI Gateway token and naming the provider in the payload, or use a Workers binding that takes a gateway ID, a query, a provider and a result limit. Orchestrating search as a server tool inside a Worker is supported now, and Cloudflare says native server tools are coming soon.

Crawler manners

Cloudflare frames the launch around crawler behaviour rather than features. It says crawlers should be honest and transparent, respect bot rules and preferences, and give site owners meaningful control over how their content is used - the same argument behind its pay-per-crawl work - and credits its search partners with signing up to those standards.

Our opinion

The interesting part is not the search box, it is where the results get billed. Routing retrieval through AI Gateway stops web search being a separate vendor relationship with its own key, its own invoice and its own dashboard, and makes it another line in the place teams already watch model spend. That is unglamorous work, and it is exactly how agent infrastructure gets adopted.