Brave Search API
Site search software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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Pay-as-you-go
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Free version
Small
Medium
Large
- Media and communications
- Public sector and nonprofit organizations
- Healthcare and life sciences
What is Brave Search API
Brave Search API is a web search API that lets developers programmatically retrieve search results from Brave’s search index for use in applications and on-site search experiences. It targets product teams and developers who need a hosted search endpoint rather than operating their own crawler and index. The API supports web-style queries and returns structured results that can be integrated into websites, apps, and internal tools. It is positioned as an alternative to search APIs that rely on third-party indexes by using Brave’s own search infrastructure.
Hosted web search endpoint
The API provides a managed search service, reducing the need to run and tune a self-hosted search stack. Teams can integrate search via HTTP requests rather than maintaining crawlers, indexing pipelines, and query infrastructure. This can shorten implementation time for basic web-style search use cases compared with building on open-source search engines.
Uses Brave-owned index
Brave Search API is based on Brave’s search index rather than being purely a wrapper over another major search provider. This can matter for organizations that want diversification from a single upstream index dependency. It also simplifies vendor management when the goal is to source results from Brave’s search corpus specifically.
Developer-friendly integration model
The product is delivered as an API, which fits common integration patterns for web and mobile applications. Results are returned in a structured format suitable for downstream ranking, filtering, and UI rendering. This approach can be easier to embed into existing systems than deploying and operating a full search platform.
Less control than self-hosted
Compared with running your own search engine and index, the API offers limited control over crawling, indexing, and low-level ranking behavior. Organizations with strict requirements for custom analyzers, synonym management, or domain-specific relevance tuning may find the API constraining. Deep customization typically requires additional application-side processing rather than native engine configuration.
Not a full site-search stack
Brave Search API provides search results but does not replace end-to-end site search tooling such as content ingestion connectors, indexing of private content, or built-in analytics dashboards. Teams may need to build or procure surrounding components (tracking, relevance testing, admin tooling) to deliver a complete site search program. This can increase total implementation effort for enterprise-grade deployments.
Dependency on external service
Using the API introduces reliance on Brave’s availability, quotas, and commercial terms. Latency and throughput are bounded by the external endpoint and network conditions. For regulated environments or offline/edge deployments, a hosted API model may not meet data residency or operational requirements.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go
Free credits: $5 in free credits that renew every month (requires attribution of the Brave Search API in your project). This allows limited free usage each month but is not a time-limited trial.
Example costs (official Brave site):
- Search — $5 per 1,000 requests. Includes Web, LLM Context, Images, News, Video, and more. Capacity: 50 requests/sec.
- Answers — $4 per 1,000 requests + $5 per 1,000,000 input/output tokens. Capacity: 2 requests/sec. (Answers returns grounded/completed answers.)
- Spellcheck — $5 per 10,000 requests. (Spellcheck is built into Search endpoints.)
- Autocomplete — $5 per 10,000 requests. (Includes entity recognition.)
- Enterprise — Custom pricing: contact Brave for bespoke plans, invoicing, and enterprise support.
Notes & limits:
- Each public plan (Search, Answers, Spellcheck, Autocomplete) receives $5 of free credit every month.
- Enterprise customers can negotiate custom terms, capacity, and zero-data-retention agreements.
Seller details
Brave Software, Inc.
San Francisco, CA, USA
2015
Private
https://brave.com/
https://x.com/brave
https://www.linkedin.com/company/brave-software/
