The prices come from Cloudflare’s documentation, read on 2 October 2026, and the product is in open beta. The ratios between them are this publication’s own arithmetic, and the providers run different search modes, so they are not a measure of value.
Cloudflare’s new Web Search API routes AI agent queries through three providers at published list prices ranging from $0.25 to $7.00 per thousand requests — with no added markup, per the docs.
This piece is built on Cloudflare’s announcement blog post of 2 October 2026 and on Cloudflare’s developer documentation — the Providers, About, and How to Use pages — read on 2 October 2026. The docs mark the product as being in open beta, and docs pages can change. This publication has not run a search or tested any provider.
On 2 October 2026, Cloudflare announced a Web Search API for AI agents and applications. The product runs through AI Gateway. Cloudflare’s blog states verbatim: “today, we’re announcing Cloudflare’s partnership with web search providers to bring you grounded intelligence via AI Gateway. We’re kicking off this launch with our partners from Ceramic.ai, Exa, and Linkup.”
The developer docs describe the product this way: “Web Search API lets your AI agents and applications search the Internet and ground their responses in live information.” The page adds that “Web Search API runs through AI Gateway, so every search gets the same logging, analytics, billing, and access controls as your model inference requests.”
Developers call a REST endpoint — a POST to the account’s /ai/websearch/ path. Authentication requires a Cloudflare API token with Workers AI Read and AI Gateway Read permissions. In a Worker, the call is env.AI.websearch with a gateway ID, a query, a provider, and a limit. The query is required and runs from 1 to 1,024 characters. The provider can be ceramic, exa, or linkup, defaulting to ceramic. The limit is an integer from 1 to 10, defaulting to 10.
The key insight: The three providers share a common output format — URL, title, and optional description, image, favicon, and last-modified date. The docs say you can switch providers by changing a single parameter. The docs do not say the results are equivalent in quality, coverage, or freshness.
Exa’s listed price is 28 times Ceramic’s. The ratio is this publication’s arithmetic from the published prices; the providers run different search modes, so it is a price gap, not a quality gap.
The Price List and This Publication’s Arithmetic
Cloudflare’s Providers page publishes these list prices per 1,000 requests: Ceramic.ai at $0.25, Linkup at $5.00, and Exa at $7.00. These are Cloudflare-published list prices as of 2 October 2026. The Providers page lists Zero Data Retention as Yes for all three providers. Cloudflare says it bills at list price with no additional markup when you pay with AI Gateway credits, and that a developer who brings their own key is billed by the provider directly.
The following ratios and totals are this publication’s own arithmetic, not Cloudflare’s: Exa’s $7.00 is 28 times Ceramic.ai’s $0.25. Linkup’s $5.00 is 20 times Ceramic.ai’s. Exa is 1.4 times Linkup. At those list prices, one million requests cost $250 with Ceramic.ai, $5,000 with Linkup, and $7,000 with Exa.
Cloudflare’s blog says it is building native Server Tools into AI Gateway, with web search among the first, and describes them as coming soon. They are not part of this launch. The docs do not say whether the price changes with the number of results requested. The limit parameter defaults to 10, with a maximum of 10.
What the Docs Say About Each Provider
The prices are not a like-for-like comparison. The Providers page describes each provider differently.
Ceramic.ai — $0.25 / 1,000 requests
DEFAULT
The docs say Ceramic.ai runs its own independent web index of more than 40 billion pages, designed for AI agents and LLM applications. Results include long descriptions of each page, up to 8,000 characters. The 40 billion figure is the docs’ description of Ceramic.ai’s index; this publication has not checked it.
Exa — $7.00 / 1,000 requests
The docs say requests use Exa’s auto search type, and each result includes highlights — the text snippets most relevant to the query — returned as the result description.
Linkup — $5.00 / 1,000 requests
The docs say requests use Linkup’s fast search depth with raw search results, so Linkup returns results without generating an answer.
All three providers return results in the same format: a URL, title, and optional description, image, favicon, and last-modified date. The docs do not say the results are equivalent in quality, coverage, or freshness.
The Crawler Standards
Cloudflare’s About page says every Web Search API provider has committed to two standards.
1
Verified bot compliance: the crawler each provider uses must meet Cloudflare’s published requirements for verified bots, which includes identifying the crawler and respecting robots.txt.
2
Source attribution: every search result must include a link to the location of the crawled content.
Cloudflare Blog — 2 October 2026
“When you use web search on Cloudflare, you choose to consume search knowledge from operators committed to providing the transparency, control, and visibility that helps build a better Internet, by identifying their crawlers, respecting robots.txt, and providing the source of search results.”
What Is Not Established
Not established, and therefore absent from this analysis: any measurement of result quality, freshness, latency or coverage for any provider; whether the price depends on the limit parameter; any rate limits or volume caps; how many customers use the product; what Cloudflare earns beyond what its docs state; when open beta ends; and any comment from Ceramic.ai, Exa or Linkup.
The crawler standards are commitments that the providers have made, as reported by Cloudflare. This publication has not audited any provider’s crawler. The prices are list prices published on 2 October 2026, and docs pages can change.
None of the above is investment advice. It reports what Cloudflare’s blog and documentation say about a product in open beta.
The prices, parameters and crawler commitments above come from Cloudflare’s announcement blog post of 2 October 2026 and its developer documentation (the Providers, About and How to use pages), read on 2 October 2026. The docs mark the product as being in open beta, and pages can change. This publication has not run a search or tested any provider.The 28x, 20x and 1.4x ratios and the one-million-request costs are this publication’s own arithmetic from the published prices.
The providers run different search modes and the docs do not compare result quality, so none of those figures is a measure of value.The 40 billion pages figure is the Providers page’s description of Ceramic.ai’s index and has not been checked here. The crawler standards are commitments reported by Cloudflare, not an audit.Nothing above predicts anything and nothing here is investment advice.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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