Brave Search Freemium

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

• Web search endpoint — rank results with freshness, country, language and safesearch parameters.
• Summarizer — a generated answer with citations, billed separately, handy for quick answers.
• News, image, video and local — separate endpoints with the same auth model.
• Extraction / grounding — fetch page content for snippets so an LLM has text to cite, not just links.
• Goggles — custom re-ranking rules to bias or filter domains.
• Zero data retention — available on higher plans for regulated workloads.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Product Features

• Web search endpoint — rank results with freshness, country, language and safesearch parameters.
• Summarizer — a generated answer with citations, billed separately, handy for quick answers.
• News, image, video and local — separate endpoints with the same auth model.
• Extraction / grounding — fetch page content for snippets so an LLM has text to cite, not just links.
• Goggles — custom re-ranking rules to bias or filter domains.
• Zero data retention — available on higher plans for regulated workloads.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

What is Brave Search API?

Brave runs its own crawler (the site claims 30+ billion pages indexed) and sells API access to it. That matters for AI apps because several major search APIs have restricted or repriced access for generative use, and dependency on a single index is a business risk.

The product is not the Brave browser. Same company, different surface. You get JSON web results with titles, snippets, URLs and optional summaries.

Product Features

• Web search endpoint — rank results with freshness, country, language and safesearch parameters.
• Summarizer — a generated answer with citations, billed separately, handy for quick answers.
• News, image, video and local — separate endpoints with the same auth model.
• Extraction / grounding — fetch page content for snippets so an LLM has text to cite, not just links.
• Goggles — custom re-ranking rules to bias or filter domains.
• Zero data retention — available on higher plans for regulated workloads.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.

Brave Search API is a search endpoint built on Brave’s own index, not a reseller of Google or Bing results. The free tier allows 2,000 queries per month at one query per second; paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.

What is Brave Search API?

Brave runs its own crawler (the site claims 30+ billion pages indexed) and sells API access to it. That matters for AI apps because several major search APIs have restricted or repriced access for generative use, and dependency on a single index is a business risk.

The product is not the Brave browser. Same company, different surface. You get JSON web results with titles, snippets, URLs and optional summaries.

Product Features

• Web search endpoint — rank results with freshness, country, language and safesearch parameters.
• Summarizer — a generated answer with citations, billed separately, handy for quick answers.
• News, image, video and local — separate endpoints with the same auth model.
• Extraction / grounding — fetch page content for snippets so an LLM has text to cite, not just links.
• Goggles — custom re-ranking rules to bias or filter domains.
• Zero data retention — available on higher plans for regulated workloads.

Product Highlights

Independence is the selling point. If your product’s citations come from an index nobody else controls, your answers do not disappear when a competitor changes terms. Latency is decent — typical p50 under 400 ms for a web query from a US region.

Pricing tiers: Free with 2,000 queries per month capped at 1 QPS. Data for AI plans run $5 per 1,000 queries (Base), with volume discounts above 100,000. The Summarizer is priced per 1,000 requests separately, so a summarised query costs several times a raw search.

Real limitations. The index is smaller than Google’s for long-tail or non-English queries, and Chinese-language coverage is noticeably weaker. The free tier’s 1 QPS ceiling makes it useless for load testing, and results do not include the rich structured data that Google’s Custom Search JSON offers.

Who should use it (and who should not)

Good fit: RAG products that need an affordable, permissive search API with citations and no SEO-blocked scraping. Bad fit: teams needing pixel-perfect Google parity, or heavy Chinese and regional search — for those, a regional engine plus a second provider is safer.

Use Cases

• Grounding an internal assistant with fresh web results.
• Competitive monitoring on a cron job at 2,000 queries a month.
• Building an answer engine with citation cards.
• News alerts for brand mentions in five languages.
• A second search provider as failover behind a primary API.

Quick Summary

• Brave Search API uses Brave’s own web index.
• Free: 2,000 queries per month at 1 QPS.
• Paid Data for AI plans start at $5 per 1,000 queries.
• Includes a summarizer with citations and page extraction.
• Weaker non-English coverage than Google; no rich results.