Brave Search API

What is Brave Search API?

Brave Search API gives developers programmatic access to the same independent search index that powers Brave Search, which Brave says is built without relying on Google or Bing. The LLM Context endpoint returns pre-extracted, token-budgeted page content so an agent or RAG pipeline does not need to scrape pages itself, while Web Search returns ranked titles, URLs and snippets for a human-facing results page with local and rich enrichments. Separate endpoints cover news, images, videos and places, and an Answers plan returns AI-generated answers grounded in live searches with sources. Autosuggest and Spellcheck plans are sold separately. You create an account, activate a plan with a credit card, generate an API key and send requests with a subscription-token header. New plans are prepaid, with free monthly credits, and custom plans are available for high-volume use.

Use cases

• Ground LLM answers in live web results
• Feed RAG pipelines with extracted page content
• Build a custom web search page
• Give AI agents a search tool
• Fetch news, image and video results by query
• Add autocomplete and spelling correction

Who it's for

• AI developers
• Agent builders
• Product engineers
• Search product teams

Why use Brave Search API

• An index that Brave runs itself means results do not come from scraping another search engine.
• LLM Context returns clean page content within a token budget, which reduces scraping and trimming work in agent code.
• One API family covers web, news, images, videos, places and grounded answers, so a single vendor can serve both human and AI search features.
• Usage limits, alerts and auto-reload make it easier to control spend on a prepaid balance.
• Custom plans exist for high-volume or specialized needs.

Brave Search API features

• LLM Context endpoint with pre-extracted, token-budgeted content
• Web Search with ranked results and local and rich enrichments
• News, image, video and place search endpoints
• Answers endpoint with AI answers backed by real-time search
• Separate Autosuggest and Spellcheck plans
• Independent index with no user tracking or profiling
• Up to 10 API keys per plan
• Usage limits, usage alerts and prepaid balance auto-reload
• Drop-in skills for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex

Brave Search API integrations

• Claude Code
• Cursor
• Codex
• Stripe

How to get started with Brave Search API

1. Create a free account and verify your email address.
2. Activate a plan in the dashboard and enter a credit card.
3. Generate an API key in the API Keys section and keep it out of client-side code.
4. Send a request, for example to the LLM Context endpoint, with your key in the X-Subscription-Token header.
5. Pass the returned grounding snippets and sources to your model, or render web results in your own interface, and monitor usage in the dashboard.

Brave Search API limitations

• A credit card is required to activate any plan
• Retaining data received through the API is prohibited without contacting Brave, including storing results or training an LLM
• New plans are prepaid and unused credits are not refundable
• Free monthly credits are replaced each month and do not carry over

Brave Search API pricing

Brave Search API has no free plan.

Brave Search API plans

• Search

  Price on vendor site

  • Web, news, image and video search
  • Local enrichments and rich data
  • LLM Context
  • Recurring monthly credits

• Answers

  Price on vendor site

  • AI answers grounded on one or more searches
  • Recurring monthly credits

• Autosuggest

  Price on vendor site

  • Autocomplete suggestions

• Spellcheck

  Price on vendor site

  • Spelling correction

Plans as listed on the official pricing page on 24 Oct 2026. Prices can change and may vary by country or exclude tax. Check the official pricing page.

Brave Search API alternatives

The main Brave Search API alternatives listed on Debuly are Tavily, Exa, SerpApi, You.com API, Perplexity Sonar API and Firecrawl. The table compares pricing and platforms; order is A–Z.

1. 

   Exa

   Web search API for AI agents and apps that returns relevant passages with citations, billed pay-as-you-go from a free monthly credit.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Exa (official site)
2. 

   Firecrawl

   Web data API for AI agents: search, scrape, crawl and interact with websites and get clean content back, with a free tier.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Firecrawl (official site)
3. 

   Perplexity Sonar API

   Pay-as-you-go Perplexity API for web-grounded answers, ranked search results, embeddings and typed decisions, with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

   Developer platformsResearch and search
   PaidVisit Perplexity Sonar API (official site)
4. 

   SerpApi

   Real-time search engine results API that returns Google and other SERP data as structured JSON, handling proxies and CAPTCHAs.

   Developer platformsMarketing and SEOResearch and search
   FreemiumVisit SerpApi (official site)
5. 

   Tavily

   Web search, extraction and crawling API built for AI agents and RAG, with a free tier of 1,000 credits a month.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit Tavily (official site)
6. 

   You.com API

   You.com API provides real-time web search, page contents, cited answers and multi-step research endpoints for AI apps, billed per call.

   Developer platformsResearch and searchAutomation and agents
   FreemiumVisit You.com API (official site)

Brave Search API FAQ

Sources & verification

Facts on this page come from the official sources below, each with the date we read it. Written by Debuly; the vendor did not review this page.

Image credits

• Logo: from brave.com · fetched 23 Oct 2026 · Vendor trademark, used only to identify the product; removed on request
• Cover: none collected yet, so a generated tile is shown.

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