Brave Search API gives developers programmatic access to Brave's independent web index, which covers 40+ billion pages and receives 100+ million page updates a day. The Search plan returns full results, including URLs, text, news and images plus LLM context tuned for AI, at $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan returns summarized, citation-backed answers at $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens. Both plans include $5 in free credits every month, and an Enterprise tier covers custom terms, capacity and Zero Data Retention.
The API is built for engineers who ship AI agents, chatbots and RAG pipelines and need fresh web data to reduce hallucinations. It also suits ed-tech and research teams that gather citations, CRM and sales-intelligence builders enriching company profiles, and model developers collecting training data. Startups can begin on the monthly credit, while large organizations can negotiate invoicing, NDAs and enterprise support. Anyone comfortable with an API key and a few lines of Python, JavaScript, Go or cURL can integrate it.
Typical uses include grounding a customer-support bot in live search results, powering an AI search engine, feeding coding assistants with current documentation, and fetching the latest news for a stock-trading assistant. Goggles let a team re-rank results or discard domains, extra snippets add up to five passages per result, and schema-enriched data handles formats such as movie reviews and wiki pages. The Answers endpoint works with the OpenAI SDK and supports streaming, and an MCP server connects Brave Search to agent frameworks. Place search and image or video endpoints cover local and media queries.
