The Brave Search API is a web search API from Brave Software, the company behind the Brave browser and Brave Search. An API (application programming interface) lets one program call another over the internet; here a program sends a search query and receives the results as JSON data. Brave answers every query from its own index of web pages and does not pass queries on to Google or Bing.
Several endpoints serve different needs. Web Search returns results pages for human-facing search, and News, Image, Video and Place search cover other content. The LLM Context endpoint, built for AI agents, returns the most relevant passages from the best pages in one call, with a URL and timestamp for each source and a size of about 1,000 to 33,000 tokens. Goggles let a customer re-rank results and define custom sets of domains. An Answers endpoint returns AI-written answers with citations.
The API is a hosted, pay-per-use service with prepaid credits and no subscription: credits are bought in advance and drawn down per request, and every account receives free credits each month.