Brave Search API provides programmatic access to Brave's independent web index, containing billions of web pages crawled without dependencies on Google or Bing. It offers standard web search results along with an LLM Context API that extracts clean, ranked text passages, tables, and code snippets optimized for AI agent grounding. The Free plan includes 2,000 queries per month with a 1 request per second rate limit and no credit card required.
Free tier quotas
Monthly Search Queries
2,000 queries/month free forever
Rate Limit
1 request per second (RPS)
LLM Context API
Clean Markdown passages and structured tables for AI grounding
Index Independence
100% independent index with zero Google or Bing dependency
Agent Support
Official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support
Payment Requirement
No credit card required
Not yet verified. Always confirm on the official pricing page.
👍 Good boy
+Queries an independent web index with zero reliance on Google or Microsoft Bing APIs.
+Extracts compact Markdown passages and structured data specifically formatted for LLM agents.
+Delivers fast responses without multi-hop proxy scraping latency.
+Offers 2,000 queries per month free forever with no credit card required.
👎 Watch out
−Rate limit on the free tier is capped at 1 query per second, requiring queueing for batch tasks.
−Commercial rights to cache data or train machine learning models require higher paid tiers.
−Image, video, and news search calls draw from the same 2,000 monthly query pool.
−Customer support on the free plan is limited to technical documentation and developer guides.
The catch
Calls are rate-limited to 1 request per second, and monthly usage pauses after 2,000 queries.
Free tier value
Generosity
A
Estimated value
$10/mo
Feature parity
Access to Web Search and LLM Context endpoints with 1 query/sec rate limit
Screenshots
Brave Search API LLM Context and Benchmark OverviewBrave Enterprise Partner Ecosystem AWS IntegrationBrave Firecrawl Integration Badge
