Brave Search API vs Kagi Search API for AI agents
Programmatic access to Brave Search, which runs its own independent web index. Kagi Search API is programmatic access to Kagi's premium, ad-free search results for search products and agents.
The short answer
- Brave Search API: Independent (non-Google, non-Bing) web results at a simple flat price, with fast throughput.
- Kagi Search API: High-quality, ad-free results with clear terms that explicitly allow feeding results to an LLM.
Side by side
| Brave Search API | Kagi Search API | |
|---|---|---|
| Searches | Brave's own independent index (Brave says 40+ billion pages); web, news, images, video. | Kagi's search results (web, news, video, podcasts, images per its MCP). |
| Returns | JSON web results (URLs, titles, snippets, up to five extra snippets), news, images and more, plus an LLM-context endpoint; a separate Answers plan returns AI answers. | JSON search results; optionally full Markdown extraction of the top results in the same request. |
| Before the first call | An account, an API key, and a credit card even for the free credit (used for identity, not charged). | A Kagi account, an API key from the API dashboard, and billing set up (pay-per-use, prepaid credit or invoice). |
| Free | $5 in free credits every month (about 1,000 searches at $5 per 1,000); card required. | Not stated on its pages |
| Paid | $5 per 1,000 requests (Search plan, 50 queries per second). | $12 per 1,000 requests; Extract $4 per 1,000 pages. |
| Acting on a result | Through the web page each result links to | Through the web page each result links to |
| Limits on keeping or showing results | No storing, caching or building a database of results beyond transient storage unless you buy a plan that explicitly grants storage rights. | No storing, caching or building a database of results beyond transient caching; cached results must be deleted on termination. |
| AI in its terms | Results may not be used to create, train, fine-tune or benchmark AI models (storage-rights plans are separate). | Sending results to an AI model to answer your users is allowed; training or fine-tuning models, or harvesting training/evaluation datasets, is not. |
| MCP server | Official MCP server from Brave: https://github.com/brave/brave-search-mcp-server | Official MCP server: https://mcp.kagi.com/mcp (code: https://github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp) |
Questions people ask
What do I need before I can use Brave Search API?
An account, an API key, and a credit card even for the free credit (used for identity, not charged).
Is Brave Search API free?
$5 in free credits every month (about 1,000 searches at $5 per 1,000); card required.
What do I need before I can use Kagi Search API?
A Kagi account, an API key from the API dashboard, and billing set up (pay-per-use, prepaid credit or invoice).
Is Kagi Search API free?
Its pages listed no free use when we read them on October 15, 2026.
Sources
Every line about another company comes from its own pages. Prices and terms change, so check the source before you rely on one.
Brave Search API, read on October 15, 2026:
- brave.com/search/api: “$5 per 1,000 requests”
- brave.com/search/api: “Includes $5 in free credits every month”
- brave.com/search/api: “Brave's index includes 40+ billion pages, kept fresh by 100+ million page updates every day.”
- brave.com/search/api: “Get up to five snippets picked in real time to maximize contextual relevance to a search.”
- brave.com/search/api: “For free plans, the card is only used to confirm your identity and will not be charged.”
- brave.com/search/api: “you will need to subscribe to a plan that explicitly grants storage rights.”
- api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/resources/terms-of-service: “store, cache, or create a database of Search Results, in whole or in part, other than transient storage”
- api-dashboard.search.brave.com/documentation/resources/terms-of-service: “use the Search Results to create, evaluate, train, re-train, fine-tune, benchmark”
Kagi Search API, read on October 15, 2026:
- kagi.com/api/pricing: “$12 /1k requests”
- kagi.com/api/pricing: “$4 /1k pages”
- kagi.com/api/docs: “The Search API is a feature-rich endpoint for search products and agents.”
- kagi.com/api/docs: “You can also request full markdown extraction of the top results in a single API request.”
- help.kagi.com/kagi/api/overview.html: “The API uses a pay-per-use model”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “Store, cache, or build a database of Results beyond the transient caching needed to operate your application.”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “including sending Results to an AI model to answer your users' queries.”
- kagi.com/privacy/api: “Use Results to train or fine-tune a search index, ranking system, translation or summarization model”
- github.com/kagisearch/kagimcp: “The Official Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Kagi Search & other tools.”