Cloudflare Web Search API: agent search on your AI Gateway bill

Your agent's search calls just got a home next to its model calls. Cloudflare launched the Web Search API via AI Gateway on October 2: one endpoint that sends queries to Exa, Linkup or Ceramic.ai, bills them at the partner's list price with no Cloudflare markup, and logs them in the same place as your inference traffic.

What actually happened

Per Cloudflare's launch post, there are two ways to call it today. A REST POST to /accounts/{account_id}/ai/websearch/, or one line in a Worker: env.AI.websearch(). The parameters are plain: query, provider, limit, and gatewayId. A third option, "server tools" that the gateway runs for the model without your own orchestration code, is listed as coming soon.

Billing draws from AI Gateway's unified credit balance, the same pool that pays for model calls. If you already hold a key with one of the partners, bring-your-own-key works the way it does for model providers. Requests appear in normal AI Gateway logs, and the same access controls decide which providers a team can use. Cloudflare says it will flag which partners support zero data retention.

Why it matters for your business

Every useful agent we build ends up needing live data: today's price, a supplier's current terms, a competitor's new page. Until now that meant a separate search vendor, a separate API key, a separate invoice, and search traffic that never showed up next to the model spend it fed.

Search is part of the cost of a task. When search and inference sit in one log, you can price a whole agent run, not just its tokens. That is the number a client actually pays for.

Provider is a parameter, not a migration. Switching from Exa to Linkup is a string change. Run the same queries through two providers for a week and keep the one that returns better results for your domain.

Check retention before you send customer data. Agents put real names and order details into search queries more often than people expect. Use a provider marked zero data retention for anything customer-shaped, and keep that rule in the gateway config, not in a prompt.

Sources: Cloudflare blog: Introducing Web Search API via AI Gateway.