Today, Brave is excited to announce the release of the Brave Search API, making the backbone of Brave Search available to companies and developers worldwide as they build the next generation of apps that require Web search capabilities.

As the only privacy-preserving and independent search index in the West, Brave Search brings much-needed competition to Google and Microsoft Bing. The Brave Search API allows anyone to integrate billions of private, ad-free results from the Web with a simple API call.

The Brave Search API delivers great quality at an affordable cost. Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models developers in particular should benefit from the Search API, which offers access to high-quality, Web-scale data, with exhaustive coverage of recent events. It also brings a novel data set versus competitors who might be falling back to the standard Google / Bing options.

With a free plan and affordable paid plans starting from $3 per 1000 queries, the Brave Search API gives independent search access to all. Those interested can get started at api.search.brave.com.

Brave Search, the Brave browser, and innovation

Since its initial launch in June 2021, Brave Search has grown to over 8 billion annualized queries, making it the fastest growing search engine since Bing. As the only global, independent alternative to Google and Bing, Brave Search is striving to make Web search more private and transparent. It’s also constantly innovating, with novel features like Goggles, Discussions, and the AI Summarizer, giving users more relevant results.

Brave Search is the default search engine in the Brave browser, which has nearly 60 million users worldwide. The browser’s opt-in Web Discovery Project adds millions of new webpages to the index every single day, and ensures the index is populated with real, useful data: no dead links, SEO spam, or other junk content. Together, this private browser / private search combo ensures a constant source of fresh data for the index, and for the Search API.

The Goggles feature expands and customizes the ranking. Goggles allow any individual—or community of people—to alter the ranking of Brave Search by using a set of instructions (rules and filters). Anyone can create, apply, or extend a Goggle. Essentially Goggles act as a custom re-ranking on top of the Brave search index. This means that, instead of a single ranking, Brave Search can offer an almost limitless number of ranking options.

All Goggles will appear in the Brave Search API.

Pricing tiers, and getting started with the Brave Search API

Anyone can visit api.search.brave.com and start testing in minutes. After creating an account, users can search the Web and get back every result the search engine has access to, in an easy, intuitive format. This includes Web results, enriched metadata, entity search, news, video results, and more.

All users can get started for free for up to 1 query per second, and 2,000 queries per month. For users who need more, we offer a variety of paid plan options:

Those interested in testing and integrating the Brave Search API into enterprise-level applications can email bizdev@brave.com to discuss customized Search API pricing and integration.

Brave’s ongoing mission to improve search

Brave is on a mission to build a user-first Web. That mission starts with the Brave browser and Brave Search. But it also means using Brave’s private-by-default approach to power other search and AI applications—with the release of the Brave Search API, we hope to spread independence and transparency across the Web.

Learn more about the Brave Search API.