Cloudflare's Web Search API Passes Through Exa, Linkup and Ceramic.ai Prices

Cloudflare opened a beta of a Web Search API on Oct. 2 that lets an agent query the live web through AI Gateway, with three providers behind one endpoint and no markup on any of them. The price a developer pays is whatever Ceramic.ai, Exa or Linkup charges, so the provider field in the request is also the budget line.

The launch post was written by Michelle Chen and Sam Else and is dated Oct. 2, 2026. Cloudflare's changelog entry says the API "is now available in beta."

What a call looks like

The REST endpoint is https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/{ACCOUNT_ID}/ai/websearch/. The post's example sends a JSON body with a query, a provider of ceramic, and a limit of 5. Inside a Cloudflare Worker, the same call is env.AI.websearch({ gatewayId, query, provider, limit }).

Requests appear in the normal AI Gateway logs and draw down AI Gateway credits at "each provider's list API price, with no additional markup," according to the changelog. Developers can instead bring their own provider key and be billed by the provider.

What the three providers charge

Cloudflare's post gives no price. It also gives no latency figure, no rate limit and no result-freshness guarantee, and it does not say what happens when a provider is down. The numbers have to come from the providers.

Exa's pricing page lists search at $4 per 1,000 requests, deep search at $12 to $15 per 1,000, and page contents at $1 per 1,000 pages. Linkup's pricing page lists search at $0.005 to $0.006 per request, which is $5 to $6 per 1,000, and 4,000 free queries.

1. Exa search4 USD
2. Linkup search5 USD

Source: Exa pricing page and Linkup pricing page, accessed 2026-10-06; Linkup shown at the low end of its range

Ceramic.ai, the default in the post's example, is the cheap one. SaaS City, an independent blog, reports $0.25 per 1,000 requests for Ceramic through Cloudflare, which is 16 times below Exa's search price on its own page. That is a secondary figure: Ceramic's own page was not checked, and SaaS City lists Exa at $7 per 1,000, not the $4 on Exa's page. The two Exa numbers may describe different products. Cloudflare's post does not say which Exa endpoint it calls.

Provider	Cloudflare's description	Price source
Ceramic.ai	Default in the example request	SaaS City, secondary
Exa	Called with provider: "exa" in the Worker example	Exa pricing page
Linkup	Listed as a launch provider	Linkup pricing page

The prices cover the search call only. Model tokens spent reading the results are billed separately by whichever model the agent runs.

The zero-retention wording

The changelog says all three providers support Zero Data Retention, meaning the provider does not keep the query, and that all three have committed to Cloudflare's verified-bot crawling standards. The launch post is more cautious: it says Cloudflare "will identify partners supporting Zero Data Retention." It does not list which ones. A team sending customer text in a query should treat the post, not the changelog, as the binding statement until the docs name the providers.

That gap is the part a security review will ask about. The Terminal has also covered Cloudflare's Clef decision model, another agent-oriented launch from the company this season, and the agent-testing project TesterArmy e2e.

Cloudflare has not said when the beta ends or what the prices will be at general availability. Because they are pass-through, the next provider list-price change is also Cloudflare's.