How does the Brave Search API compare to other Web search API options?
If you’re building a search application, training AI models, or grounding AI chat bots, there are several options available. These include startups like Perplexity, Exa, and Tavily, as well as established players like Google and previously, Bing. In May 2025, Bing announced the retirement of their API, taking place in August 2025. Google, on the other hand, never made their Web index as broadly available to developers as Microsoft did with the Bing API. Their product, Google Programmatic Search Engine (PSE), has rigid constraints that limit use to narrow applications and is thus not useful for AI grounding, AI training, or powering alternative search engines.
When considering alternatives to the Bing API, Google PSE, or any of the other available options, it’s good to have a rubric to decide which is best suited for your product needs. If you want your AI applications to deliver more relevant and factual answers, or to build world-class search applications for millions of users, factors like pricing, data quality and recency, uptime, and speed all matter.
The Brave Search API ticks each of these boxes. It delivers results from its own, independent index of the Web (an index containing over 30 billion pages). It’s also powered by real queries and clicks in the Brave browser and Brave Search engine, which results in a more natural, human-representative index.
Below, we’ve compiled a comparison of the Brave Search API against competitors, based on seven key points: pricing; speed; features and capabilities; privacy; index size and data sourcing; developer friendliness; and use cases.
Pricing
Search APIs tend to be sold on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. In order to offer more flexibility, the Brave Search API has several pricing options that start entirely free (2,000 queries per month), then gradually increase with customer needs such as rights to store data or rights to use the data in LLM training. Brave Search API paid plans begin at $3 CPM.
While cost is an important factor, it’s important to remember that not all requests are made equal. For example, Exa offers plans as low as $2.5 CPM, but these plans come at the cost of slower speeds and more basic search ranking. Tavily offers a pay-as-you-go tier starting at $8 CPM, along with project-based pricing that scales with the size of the project.
Meanwhile, Google’s pricing starts at $5 CPM, albeit in a more limited capacity as previously mentioned.
Speed
The Brave Search API is powered by high-performance infrastructure, and built to handle the request volume and speed necessary for world-class applications—this includes Brave Search itself, which handles more than 40 million searches per day, with 95% of requests returned in less than 1 second.
Other search solutions tend to have higher latencies, especially in the case of third-party scrapers that rely on residential IP proxies or relayed requests to other search engines.
Features and capabilities
The Brave Search API offers standard Web, image, video, and news search, along with rich search responses like sports scores, calculations and conversions, stock widgets, and more. It also offers suggest and spellcheck. For each endpoint, the Brave Search API offers an intuitive range of parameters, headers, and response objects for flexible programming.
Some offerings, like Exa and Tavily, pull raw content from pages, but Brave does not. Instead, Brave serves up well-structured snippets of page content that help to summarize the core information of the page. This can help to quickly provide context for follow-up queries without requiring additional network requests.
Privacy and quality of source data
The Brave brand is built on privacy. Its browser blocks trackers and ads, fingerprinting and third-party cookies, phishing and malware, and more by default. Its search engine does not profile users, and offers a unique combination of anonymity and Big Tech-independence. Brave Search even gives users the ability to remove their personal information from the index.
Brave Search is also built on more than just Web crawlers: its Web Discovery Project allows Brave browser users to opt in and contribute anonymous data about searches and webpage visits. This level of voluntary human contribution to an index is unique in the world of API search and training data.
Index size and data
Brave Search is powered by an independent index of over 30 billion pages, an index that grows by over one hundred million new and refreshed pages each day. This enables Brave Search to be competitive in quality with both Bing and Google.
Others do not operate Web indexes at the same scale as Brave, Google, and Bing. Instead, they rely on a combination of on-demand scraping, their own crawlers, and tools like the Bing API to achieve effective ranking. In other words, they may be effective for basic queries, but not less-common “long tail” queries.
Developer friendly
The Brave Search API is a straightforward REST API and has easy-to-follow documentation. It has a generous free tier for testing and other projects, and comprehensive plans that scale fairly with business needs. It also has an active community of developers, producing community-driven SDKs.
The API is developed by the company behind the Brave browser and Brave Search engine, with more than 85 million users worldwide, and millions more downloads each month. This means the Brave Search API brings long-term support and stability.
Use cases
The Brave Search API is an open-ended product with many possible uses (just as people have many possible uses for search engines, and apply that breadth to software development). The most common uses today are in training and grounding several of the Web’s biggest large language models (LLM), in addition to powering popular AI apps. This is likely to continue to be the primary use case for the Brave Search API, as an increasing number of AI agents operate in the wild who, like humans, thrive when given access to the open Web.
The benefits of Brave
The Brave Search API is affordable, offers an extensive index, and a unique, powerful data set you won’t find anywhere else. It’s built by Brave (creators of the Brave browser and Brave Search engine), and emphasizes an open philosophy for data access—that is, to foster an open ecosystem where many parties can benefit from our Web index. And since we do not rely on any third parties, Brave can be a partner for the long term, without dependencies or sudden price hikes, unlike many competitors.
There are no ads in the API results. It offers specific plans for storing results if developers are building a persistent dataset. And it continues to expand its index quality and breadth via community input, user contributions via the Web Discovery Project, and ranking innovations like Goggles and Re-rank.
