The Brave Search API shows exponential growth, emerging as the best search tool to power AI apps

Three years ago, Brave released the Brave Search API to provide developers with access to Brave’s independent search index of now 40 billion Web pages. Usage has grown exponentially since then, with thousands of new users signing up each day and billions of weekly API calls.

This increase in API calls coincides with huge growth in user adoption of AI in general—users who expect timely, accurate, in-depth answers. This makes Web search one of the most critical components of an app’s technical stack. An AI app’s access to the Web has to be fast, accurate, up-to-date, and reliable long-term.

Until recently, there were only three primary sources for this Web search: Brave, Google, and Bing. But 2025 saw significant change in this landscape: in August of last year, Microsoft shut down Bing’s public API; a few months later, Google took legal action against SerpApi, sending a clear signal that the days of free scraping are over. In short, Brave is one of just three Web search indexes at scale in the West, and it’s the only one commercially available in a reliable, independent Search API.

This leaves the Brave Search API as the only viable option for AI app makers. It also happens to be the best option:

• Here for the long-term: Powered by its own, independent index of the Web, Big Tech lawsuits or attempted shutdowns will have no effect on our API’s availability or quality (something that can’t be said for scrapers)

• Private & compliant: With no intermediate calls to other indexes, Brave can guarantee privacy controls for user queries, which can help app makers achieve legal compliance. It’s also the only search API that can offer true Zero Data Retention

• Affordably priced: Transparent pricing plans as low as $5 CPM, including free request credits to get started

• Built for AI: Endpoints like LLM context and news search are built specifically for AI use cases

• Reliable & easy to use: 99.99% uptime for calls that return intuitively-structured JSON

The writing on the wall for scrapers

Companies relying on scraper-based APIs face several challenges. These solutions are inherently unstable and legally uncertain. When a scraper gets blocked or throttled, applications built on them can experience sudden disruptions. Additionally, scraper APIs typically share user data with third parties, creating compliance risks and privacy concerns that many organizations find unacceptable in today’s regulatory environment.

And these risks aren’t theoretical: In a landmark lawsuit, Google filed legal action against SerpApi for scraping its search results—violating terms, circumventing security, and undermining the rights of content creators.

While this particular lawsuit pertains to SerpApi, it’s really a signal to any company that scrapes data from Google and repackages that data for resale. It also matters for AI companies who rely on these scrapers to power their apps.

Exponential 2025 growth

While the market for Big Tech indexes has contracted, and scrapers fight for Google’s scraps, the Brave Search API has been working quietly in the background, making the product better and earning exponential growth. In 2025, adoption rates surged across industries, with developers increasingly choosing Brave as their primary search data provider.

The Brave Search API now supplies most of the top-10 LLMs with real-time Web search data; for some of those LLMs Brave is the only search engine index supporting their AI answers. This growth reflects not just market conditions, but genuine confidence in the quality and reliability of our platform.

This growth extends beyond volume to the breadth of our partners. Just as we’re seeing increased adoption from enterprise clients who prioritize data sovereignty, privacy, and long-term stability in their infrastructure decisions, we’re also seeing growth in small startups and midsized businesses. For anyone building AI or search experiences, the Brave Search API has proven to be the solution.

2025 - 2026 product improvements

Despite these competitive advantages, we haven’t rested on our laurels. We’ve continued to improve the product, release powerful APIs, and improve the developer experience through AI tooling integrations and improved documentation via our recently redesigned developer portal. Here are some of the notable changes over the last year:

LLM Context API

The most powerful search API for AI applications to date is optimized to provide LLMs with highly relevant Web context for any user query. The LLM Context API already powers Brave’s Ask Brave experience (the largest private user-facing AI app in the world at 22 million answers per day), helping it outperform end-user experiences like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode in head-to-head comparisons.

This high-quality context data is now available to any AI app maker. By contrast with scrapers (which essentially repackage Google’s 10 blue links—results optimized for human readers), Brave’s new endpoint is optimized for machine consumption, and the LLMs that power AI.

→ Read more about the LLM Context API

Simplified plans and pricing

We’ve drastically streamlined our plans and pricing, with most endpoints available under a simplified framework of Search or Answers. The Search plan delivers the real-time search data that chatbots and agents need to generate answers, from endpoints like Web search, LLM context, news, images, and more. The Answers plan delivers summarized, completed answers to any user query, with answers grounded on a single search or multiple searches for better accuracy and reduced hallucinations. And of course, bespoke Enterprise plans are available for large-scale deployments.

→ Read more about new plans and pricing

Zero Data Retention

The only search API built with privacy at its core is also the only search API that can offer true Zero Data Retention. Whereas scrapers can only offer ZDR (if at all) on the fraction of queries where they’re not scraping from Google, Brave can provide enterprise customers with ZDR on every user query. With ZDR, companies can meet ever-growing compliance obligations and gain a competitive advantage.

→ Read more about ZDR in the Brave Search API

SOC 2 Type II attestation

In 2025, the Brave Search API underwent a thorough external audit, and in October we announced that the API had earned its first SOC 2 Type II attestation. SOC 2 will give Brave Search API customers the confidence that one of the primary data sources they rely on to conduct their business has been independently verified as operating according to an industry-standard benchmark for security.

→ Read more about our SOC 2 attestation

→ Visit the Brave Trust Center

AWS Marketplace

In July, we announced the availability of the Brave Search API in the new AI Agents and Tools category of AWS Marketplace. Customers can now use AWS Marketplace to easily discover, buy, and deploy AI agents solutions, including Brave’s Search API, using their AWS accounts, accelerating agent and agentic workflow development.

→ Read more about Brave on the AWS Marketplace

MCP servers

Our MCP server and implementation integrate the Brave Search API to provide comprehensive search capabilities including Web search, local business search, image search, video search, news search, and AI-powered summarization. The project supports both STDIO and HTTP transports, with STDIO as the default mode.

→ Visit the GitHub repo for Brave’s MCP server

AI Tooling

To improve the developer experience, we also released official skills for using the Brave Search API with AI coding agents. We also released a new API assistant that’s integrated into the developer portal.

→ Visit the GitHub repo for Brave Search API skills

Ready to build with resilient, affordable, high quality data?

The Brave Search API is the only legitimate option available today. We don’t scrape. We don’t rely on others. We have our own, independent, and continuously updated Web index—built with privacy and integrity at its core. Our API is designed for developers who need reliable, future-proof access to Web search data. No loopholes. No interdependence.

Unlike scraper-based APIs, the Brave Search API is powered by its own, independent index of the Web. Brave Search receives tens of millions of unique user queries each day, and it’s the default search engine for most new users of the Brave browser. These users can anonymously contribute data to the index via the Web Discovery Project; this contribution method coupled with daily crawls help ensure the Brave Search index of 40 billion pages is constantly updated with quality data (we add or refresh more than 100 million pages each day). That means real webpages visited by actual humans, and less of the SEO spam that plagues Google and Bing.

Combined, these index-building techniques make the Brave Search API uniquely positioned to power the AI and search markets. It has affordable, transparent pricing plans. Reliable, unique, well-structured data. And a unique blend of low latency and high capacity (up to 100 queries per second, depending on the plan).

If you’re not yet a Brave Search API customer, the API is available with low-CPM subscriptions, and a $5 US monthly credit system (good for up to 1,000 calls per month) that can power small-scale projects, and enable free testing and proofs of concept.

→ Sign up and make your first API call today
→ Contact us to learn more about bespoke plans