Brave Search API
Independent web search API with its own index of 30B+ pages, purpose-built for agentic search and RAG.
About
Brave Search API gives AI agents real-time web search powered by an independent index of over 30 billion pages — not a reskinned wrapper around Google or Bing. The API returns structured JSON results across web, news, images, and video endpoints, plus a dedicated Answers endpoint that delivers LLM-optimized summaries ready for RAG pipelines.
Brave has been one of the most proactive companies in courting the agent ecosystem. They maintain an official MCP server, a dedicated skills repo supporting Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, and other agent frameworks, and Brave is the officially recommended search provider in the OpenClaw documentation. Their "agentic search" positioning is backed by features like the LLM Context API, which returns pre-extracted, relevance-scored content optimized for language model consumption.
The API offers a generous free tier with $5/month in credits (about 1,000 searches), scales to enterprise with custom pricing, and is SOC 2 Type II certified with a true zero data retention option for privacy-sensitive agent deployments.