My number one question about search APIs is always if they allow you to store and resyndicate results you get from them.
If I'm running an agent system but I'm not allowed to store the responses - or provide a "share transcript" button - that's a pretty significant limitation.
The answer to that question is inevitably buried deep in the terms. Here's the relevant section I found for Ceramic, in their list of things you can't do:
> (n) collect, aggregate, store, or compile Output, including search results, relevance scores, or rankings, for the purpose of creating or contributing to any database, dataset, index, or corpus, whether or not such database, dataset, index, or corpus is used for a purpose that competes with Ceramic; (o) resell, syndicate, or otherwise make Output available to any third party on a standalone basis or as a separately accessible component of another product or service; provided that you may display Output to your authorized end users within your own application so long as such Output is integrated into your application's functionality, is incident to the end user’s real-time query, and is not independently accessible, extractable, or downloadable by end users or third parties; or (p) retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use, unless expressly permitted in an applicable Order Form.
For those developers out there, the best is still Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 believe it or not. It gives you 1000 google searches per day for free. Compare to Flash Lite 3.x which is 5k PER MONTH and then a few pennies PER SEARCH. Nuts. Didn’t realize search was so expensive.
Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
Can Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 be made to return raw search results. Some 'search' providers I looked at returned summaries, or vector relevance matches (of presumably a smaller page set).
So I wish I could use Google for https://veruscite.com/, but the number of Google searches are a hard cap on the account! So yes that is fine for agentic coding, but for an app that relies on web-search is not sufficient.
I am currently using Perplexity fast search and fetch, and I am happy with that. I would try our Ceramic.ai, but I need to be able to fetch the pages as well (I do not want summaries).
Not joking: They need to figure out how to sell ads for agents first.
Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.
I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).
It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".
I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
To add to this, some organizations just prefer using one provider for their cloud service. So if they build on Azure/Google Cloud/AWS, then everything needs to be on there. Cloudflare probably wants to offer the same here, where everything can be built on Cloudflare.
Not sure where the trust claim lands, but the first two are now exceedingly trivial with code agents. A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all. I’ve done this myself (not with those providers) with several search platforms.
CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Same way people trust Microsoft: "We already use them, and using them for this additional service exposes no data they wouldn't already have access to from all the other services we buy from them"
I trust Cloudflare more than I trust some other players in the arena. They have a decent track record of being neutral infrastructure provider. They seem technically strong, deploying Rust widely and caring about performance in a way that most firms do not. They're likely covertly funded by intelligence services so they don't have economic incentives to enshitify their offerings or deliberately screw me over.
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.
Citation? The only case I'm aware of is when they removed DDoS protection for the Daily Stormer[0], and tbqh that made me feel more positively toward them. Yes, it was an impulsive, emotionally-motivated choice but that was relatable to me.
Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites.
Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA.
Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
Cloudflare doesn't block bots. It's trivial to use residential proxies and your very obvious bot will only get blocked maybe 5% of the time when using rotating IPs.
- block larger cohorts of traffic, affect many real users
- babysit the rules to get them just right, lose time doing that
In my experience the residential proxies exist but are not that common and many aren't trying as hard as they could. It's really a war of which side wants to spend more attention on the problem.
I was just looking into these as DeepSeek Harness w/ Qwen3.8-27B relies heavily on search. I was going to go with Serper.dev[0] $1 per 1000 (or lower in quantity).
The providers[1] behind this Web Search API have very different rates:
Ceramic.ai: $0.25 per 1,000 requests
Linkup: $5.00 per 1,000 requests
Exa: $7.00 per 1,000 requests
Let's not conflate crawlers with the traffic that bot protection services block. A crawler that respects robots.txt is a good internet citizen and can provide a vital service.
However, so-called AI crawlers are not the same as crawlers of yore. They hit live pages every time a user prompt triggers a web search.
This Web Search API, unlike an AI crawler, only fetches periodically. It feels like a step in the right direction for managing resource strain across the internet. If only the LLM giants could do something similar.
Wow I guess I am in the minority of folks building a search engine for humans now, this is a wild business model but best of luck to the 3 search index providers sitting behind this proxy, I hope it's worth their while financially speaking. Building an index is hard and expensive (I know).
My coding agent uses the hister cli, i.e. a local index. That often requires me to seed it manually as a downside. The upside is that it caches website contents via browser plugin, which is a nice workaround for bot blocking.
I am pretty sure exa specifically say it trains on your data in it's privacy policy, so how can it be ZDR ?
I remember as I was looking at the available web tools for hermes agent not to long ago and looked through the keyless web providers privacy policies, which exa is one of them.
Tried one query on ceramic.ai (the default provider for cloudflare web search api): "qwen-3.8 flash next and rtx 5090 best inference setup" ... 0 results ... same query on google and ddg both yield proper results.
Then shortened the query to just "qwen-3.8 flash next" ... results came.. all unrelated. In fact, these were almost all paper links .... no relation to actual search term.
And I had thought that I finally had found a cheaper search alternative.
You know the craziest part? This time I searched for their own website address: "ceramic.ai" .. results came... none pointing to the website or any page on it.
Then searched for "Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway" .. this text is literally in the title ... but zero link for this page.. the closest it yielded was this link: "https://developers.cloudflare.com/privacy-gateway/" ... it seems cloudflare updated this 2 days back.. the original content was last updated in 2022 ... so that's what the cutoff index seems to be.
I made a zero ads SERP using one of these "AI first" search providers: https://github.com/scosman/froogle (live version https://froogle.fyi). In this case Keenable.ai. Generally the same pattern: it's not usable.
Because it's their release week, so there's multiple new products every day. The overlap of people using HN and Cloudflare is pretty large, so not that surprising.
A related Q: why are their products so popular? I get why CDN/DDOS protection is but what about everything else? I have never ever found a use for stuff like Workers. (Sincerely asking, not dismissing them as useless)
Workers have a nice and easy deployment model (when it's not broken) compared to AWS lambda, so I get why people are tempted. It's one simple file compared to 4 separate pieces of infra. But yes, please, use anything else that doesn't pay for the CloudFlare protection racket. For example there's https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
Pages is a very convenient way of deploying static websites/SPAs with a generous free tier. You just need to find the tiny links in their dashboard to avoid accidentally using workers instead (which is supposed to supersede it but is clearly worse for this usecase).
I suspect also to do with internal Slack etc. where employees vote on launch posts (a lot of them on HN since long). Not a scam or accusing anyone but this probably propels a lot.
Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.
You are conflating a couple of different things here
There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks (and these services are likely are part of that), but ultimately it just depends on how the website owner has things set up in Cloudflare
> There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks
Verified bot is just a label. What you do with that information is entirely up to you as the operator. It doesn't say anything anything about the service and doesn't provide any guarantees about the traffic.
No it's not just a label because it's a category that gets used in the firewall settings. A lot of sites allow only verified bots and block non-verified ones. So yes as I already mentioned website owners can of course block verified bots but it's much much less common than blocking non-verified ones because most site owners don't want to accidentally deindex their site from Google...
I hate to be rude but once again I am begging people to actually read the post. It is mentioned in the second paragraph that they are all verified bots.
Actually it doesn't say they are verified bots but it does say that they follow the verified bots standards. But yes I think we can assume they are verified bots which I already said in my comment so I'm not really sure what the purpose of your reply is?
the zero-retention promise from the search providers is useful, but the requests also show up in gateway logs. can you keep the billing data without storing the actual search queries?
Weird choice by CloudFlare, would been great if they have shared why it was created.
I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search.
I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?
I guess I'm not understanding the value here - to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge. Appreciate new entrants in an existing field but not seeing this one.
>"to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge."
CloudFlare's entire business is scale, cost, and complexity. They are powering like half the web at this point. Wouldn't really call them a "new entrant".
Codex and Claude Code need to do countless web searches, I'd guess they have a partnership with Google. Open models don't have this partnership so the search API needs to come from somewhere.
If I'm running an agent system but I'm not allowed to store the responses - or provide a "share transcript" button - that's a pretty significant limitation.
The answer to that question is inevitably buried deep in the terms. Here's the relevant section I found for Ceramic, in their list of things you can't do:
> (n) collect, aggregate, store, or compile Output, including search results, relevance scores, or rankings, for the purpose of creating or contributing to any database, dataset, index, or corpus, whether or not such database, dataset, index, or corpus is used for a purpose that competes with Ceramic; (o) resell, syndicate, or otherwise make Output available to any third party on a standalone basis or as a separately accessible component of another product or service; provided that you may display Output to your authorized end users within your own application so long as such Output is integrated into your application's functionality, is incident to the end user’s real-time query, and is not independently accessible, extractable, or downloadable by end users or third parties; or (p) retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use, unless expressly permitted in an applicable Order Form.
https://www.ceramic.ai/terms-of-service
Am I alone in caring about this?
Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
It’s really really good for low cost search!
I am currently using Perplexity fast search and fetch, and I am happy with that. I would try our Ceramic.ai, but I need to be able to fetch the pages as well (I do not want summaries).
Don't give them (G) ideas.
Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.
(Was your comment a joke? Or did google announce this through different channels?)
0: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/deprecations
https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...
It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.
Cloudflare is however known to deliberately screw over some of their clients.
> I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet
I'd rather no one does, certainly not a firm that feeds into the NSA.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150898 (2025)
Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites.
Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
- let more traffic in, eat the compute cost
- block larger cohorts of traffic, affect many real users
- babysit the rules to get them just right, lose time doing that
In my experience the residential proxies exist but are not that common and many aren't trying as hard as they could. It's really a war of which side wants to spend more attention on the problem.
Why would I use bonsai? Why not use ElasticSearch directly?
And then on the providers page:
The providers[1] behind this Web Search API have very different rates:
[0] https://serper.dev/[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/web-search/providers/
This Web Search API, unlike an AI crawler, only fetches periodically. It feels like a step in the right direction for managing resource strain across the internet. If only the LLM giants could do something similar.
Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
I remember as I was looking at the available web tools for hermes agent not to long ago and looked through the keyless web providers privacy policies, which exa is one of them.
Then shortened the query to just "qwen-3.8 flash next" ... results came.. all unrelated. In fact, these were almost all paper links .... no relation to actual search term.
And I had thought that I finally had found a cheaper search alternative.
Then searched for "Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway" .. this text is literally in the title ... but zero link for this page.. the closest it yielded was this link: "https://developers.cloudflare.com/privacy-gateway/" ... it seems cloudflare updated this 2 days back.. the original content was last updated in 2022 ... so that's what the cutoff index seems to be.
Running your stuff, even private stuff, through a tunnel is great so that you don't have to expose your VPS' IPv4.
ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests
Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests
Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests
Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.
EDIT: formatting
There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks (and these services are likely are part of that), but ultimately it just depends on how the website owner has things set up in Cloudflare
Verified bot is just a label. What you do with that information is entirely up to you as the operator. It doesn't say anything anything about the service and doesn't provide any guarantees about the traffic.
1: https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi
But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.
I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search.
I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?
CloudFlare's entire business is scale, cost, and complexity. They are powering like half the web at this point. Wouldn't really call them a "new entrant".
The absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.