Brave Search API approaches 700,000 OpenClaw users, highlighting the surge in machine-first search
OpenClaw’s explosive adoption confirms Brave as the go-to Web search for the agentic future
Brave Search API has crossed a major milestone: nearly 700,000 OpenClaw users have now signed up to use the Brave Search API, and integrate the service as their agent’s primary Web search tool. This surge cements Brave as the preferred API for the fast-growing OpenClaw ecosystem, the leading open-source platform for building autonomous AI agents, which now operates under a foundation supported by OpenAI. It also signals the accelerating shift toward machine-driven search that is fundamentally reshaping the internet.
OpenClaw, with its massive community traction (evidenced by rapid GitHub growth and widespread developer enthusiasm), lists the Brave Search API as a search tool of choice to enable real-time Web access in AI agents, and Brave Search was the first provider integrated into OpenClaw. Developers have praised Brave’s independent index, strong privacy protections, reduced SEO noise, and seamless optimization for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and agent workflows.
This milestone arrives as AI agents are emerging to dominate both personal and professional tasks like scheduling, research, automation, browser navigation, form-filling, and dynamic decision-making—all of which demand reliable, full-scale Web search. Brave uniquely delivers this through its truly independent search capabilities, empowering agents to operate securely and effectively without Big Tech dependencies.
Some analysts show machine search overtaking human-initiated queries in volume in the near future, a change fueled by the proliferation of AI. This trend will intensify exponentially with embodied agents like Tesla’s Optimus robots relying on Web data for real-time awareness and planning. Soon, the average queries per day per entity—human or machine—will dwarf the old human benchmark of roughly 2.5 daily Google searches, potentially scaling to hundreds or thousands per day per active agent.
In this new era, access to a comprehensive, independent Web search index becomes strategically essential. Only three major search providers remain viable at scale: Google, Microsoft Bing, and Brave. With Google limiting API availability and Bing phasing out its API, Brave stands out as the only alternative fueling the agent revolution. It also happens to be the best option.
To wit: In a recent internal evaluation of major AI search engines, Ask Brave (powered by Brave’s LLM Context API and open-weights Qwen3) outperformed ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. While the AI industry has emphasized the importance and value of high-end models, Brave’s testing shows that less powerful open-weights models can outperform closed frontier models if they incorporate high-quality grounding data. This data is available to AI app makers and agent projects like OpenClaw via the LLM Context API.
OpenClaw’s embrace of Brave is now backed by nearly 700,000 integrated users, positioning both projects at the forefront of this transformation, where machines don’t just query the Web…they live on it.
How to use the Brave Search API with OpenClaw
If you’d like to try using the Brave Search API with OpenClaw, check out our step-by-step guide.
Note that (as with any AI agent) there are ongoing security risks with OpenClaw. If you plan to use it, you should follow the best-practices recommendations in our guide, including running OpenClaw on a dedicated machine or VM that has restricted access to sensitive data. You should also set usage limits for the Brave Search API.
About Brave Search and the Brave Search API
Brave Search is the default search engine for most of the Brave browser’s 110 million users; it’s also available as a private, high-quality alternative in any browser at search.brave.com. Brave Search is the third-largest global independent search engine, with an index of almost 40 billion webpages that handles over 2 billion monthly queries across the API and end-user search.
The Brave Search API helps anyone access this high-quality index for their AI and search projects. With the Brave Search API, customers can supply their AI LLMs with real-time data, power agentic search, train foundational models, and create search-enabled software. Any AI application can benefit from having access to the Web, ensuring the otherwise static knowledge of AI models is constantly refreshed.
If you’re not yet a Brave Search API customer, the API is available now with low-cost monthly subscriptions and a monthly credit system that makes the API free for trials and ongoing, small-scale projects.
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