I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
To add to this, some organizations just prefer using one provider for their cloud service. So if they build on Azure/Google Cloud/AWS, then everything needs to be on there. Cloudflare probably wants to offer the same here, where everything can be built on Cloudflare.
Not sure where the trust claim lands, but the first two are now exceedingly trivial with code agents. A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all. I’ve done this myself (not with those providers) with several search platforms.
CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
Weird choice by CloudFlare, would been great if they have shared why it was created.
I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search.
I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?
You are conflating a couple of different things here
There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks (and these services are likely are part of that), but ultimately it just depends on how the website owner has things set up in Cloudflare
The Zero Data Retention commitment plus the verified-bot crawling requirement is the most interesting part of this announcement. The tension between AI search products and publishers has been one of the messiest issues in this space, so Cloudflare making verified crawling a condition of the platform is a meaningful signal. Practically, routing everything through AI Gateway with unified billing is the real win — swapping providers like Exa and Linkup behind one API makes it much easier to pick the right one per query type.
Why not use those providers directly? Does Cloudflare need to be in the middle of everything?
It would be difficult for them to provide intelligence to the US without being in the middle of everything.
I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
Ease of integration and billing. Failover. Higher trust.
To add to this, some organizations just prefer using one provider for their cloud service. So if they build on Azure/Google Cloud/AWS, then everything needs to be on there. Cloudflare probably wants to offer the same here, where everything can be built on Cloudflare.
Not sure where the trust claim lands, but the first two are now exceedingly trivial with code agents. A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all. I’ve done this myself (not with those providers) with several search platforms.
CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
National security, bro.
Weird choice by CloudFlare, would been great if they have shared why it was created.
I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search.
I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?
I wonder if the three search engines get access to cloudflare protected sites without any captcha or bot interventions
Most likely not. Their Crawling service for example does not bypass the cloudflare protections either.
You are conflating a couple of different things here
There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks (and these services are likely are part of that), but ultimately it just depends on how the website owner has things set up in Cloudflare
Interesting to see that they didn't include the Brave Search API, which is really great and imo a better experience than Exa.
The absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.
The Zero Data Retention commitment plus the verified-bot crawling requirement is the most interesting part of this announcement. The tension between AI search products and publishers has been one of the messiest issues in this space, so Cloudflare making verified crawling a condition of the platform is a meaningful signal. Practically, routing everything through AI Gateway with unified billing is the real win — swapping providers like Exa and Linkup behind one API makes it much easier to pick the right one per query type.