Three years ago, Brave released the Brave Search API to provide developers with access to Brave’s independent search index of now 40 billion Web pages. Usage has grown exponentially since then, with thousands of new users signing up each day and billions of weekly API calls.
This increase in API calls coincides with huge growth in user adoption of AI in general—users who expect timely, accurate, in-depth answers. This makes Web search one of the most critical components of an app’s technical stack. An AI app’s access to the Web has to be fast, accurate, up-to-date, and reliable long-term.
Until recently, there were only three primary sources for this Web search: Brave, Google, and Bing. But 2025 saw significant change in this landscape: in August of last year, Microsoft shut down Bing’s public API; a few months later, Google took legal action against SerpApi, sending a clear signal that the days of free scraping are over. In short, Brave is one of just three Web search indexes at scale in the West, and it’s the only one commercially available in a reliable, independent Search API.
This leaves the Brave Search API as the only viable option for AI app makers. It also happens to be the best option:
