Brave Search API

Brave Search API is a developer product from Brave Software that sells programmatic access to Brave's own web index, the same index behind Brave Search. It is bought by teams building AI search, retrieval augmented generation pipelines and agents that need live web results, rather than by end users. Brave launched it on 30 May 2023 and states the index covers more than 30 billion pages with over 100 million page updates a day, refreshed in part through the opt-in Web Discovery Project in the Brave browser. Two self-serve products are priced publicly. Search returns ranked results with LLM-optimized context at $5 per 1,000 requests and 50 queries per second. Answers returns cited, synthesized responses grounded on one or more searches at $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens, at 2 queries per second. Both include $5 in free credits every month, applied automatically, and Brave collects a card on the free plan as an anti-fraud check while stating it will not be charged. Specialized endpoints cover news, image, video, place, summarizer, autosuggest and spellcheck. An Enterprise tier covering custom terms, capacity and Zero Data Retention is sold on request and is not priced publicly. Brave publishes a first-party MCP server on its own GitHub organization exposing nine tools across web, local, image, video, news, place and summarizer search plus LLM context, which lets MCP clients query the index without custom integration work. The Answers endpoint is also OpenAI SDK compatible. Brave names customers including Mistral AI, Cohere, Snowflake, Shopify, AWS, Chegg, Turnitin, Together.ai and Axel Springer, and reported the API approaching 700,000 OpenClaw users in April 2026. On security and data handling, Brave states the Search API is SOC 2 Type II attested and publishes a product-scoped trust center carrying SOC 2, GDPR and PCI DSS SAQ A. Search query logs are retained for a maximum of 90 days for billing, troubleshooting and abuse prevention, and Zero Data Retention, under which queries are not stored at all, is offered to Enterprise customers only. Brave's standard terms do not allow buyers to store search results or use them to train or fine-tune an AI model. Doing either means buying a paid plan that specifically grants storage rights. Brave sells those plans on request and does not publish their price. Current state Q3 2026: Search is $5 per 1,000 requests and Answers is $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens, with $5 in free credits applied every month. The first-party MCP server exposes nine tools and Brave added a Place Search endpoint during 2026. Brave reported the API approaching 700,000 OpenClaw users in April 2026. SOC 2 Type II is attested and the product trust center lists SOC 2, GDPR and PCI DSS SAQ A. Zero Data Retention is Enterprise only. Storing results, or using them to train or fine-tune a model, still needs a paid plan that grants storage rights, and Brave still does not publish what those plans cost.