This Web Search API, unlike an AI crawler, only fetches periodically. It feels like a step in the right direction for managing resource strain across the internet. If only the LLM giants could do something similar.
But that's meaningless because 99% of AI crawlers are "bad bots" which ignore robots.txt and use domestic IPs to circumvent blocks.
Some other reports of this: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/1565
I ended up just fully closing connections with no response from these assholes on any URL.
Then shortened the query to just "qwen-3.8 flash next" ... results came.. all unrelated. In fact, these were almost all paper links .... no relation to actual search term.
And I had thought that I finally had found a cheaper search alternative.
Then searched for "Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway" .. this text is literally in the title ... but zero link for this page.. the closest it yielded was this link: "https://developers.cloudflare.com/privacy-gateway/" ... it seems cloudflare updated this 2 days back.. the original content was last updated in 2022 ... so that's what the cutoff index seems to be.
I personally used to use Firecrawl's paid credits (got a bunch of em for free at an event) before I realized that they allow you to self-host your own instance (albeit missing some features I never use anyways).
It's been working really well for my agents, I even hosted a small observability tool that proxies the requests so I can see how many are failing and the percentages are always below 2%.
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
Verified bot is just a label. What you do with that information is entirely up to you as the operator. It doesn't say anything anything about the service and doesn't provide any guarantees about the traffic.
I remember as I was looking at the available web tools for hermes agent not to long ago and looked through the keyless web providers privacy policies, which exa is one of them.
Here we are, one layer of indirection more: Ceramic, Exa, Linkup. Who knows what they use. If you told me that those 3 build and maintain their own index, I'd first question whether that was true, and if it is, I would question whether it was any good (relative to Google/Bing/Brave).
So what is CF providing here? Maybe some free credits to entice us to use their router? No, not that either ("billed to your AI Gateway credits"). Maybe a comparison of which agent search yields the best results? Nope.
It's a crappy proxy- probably less efficient and more volatile than hitting the agent API directly.
This is only if I understand the product correctly (which I admittedly skimmed) due to the sheer number of screeching vibey nothingburgers coming out of CF over the past month.
Hi! Exa Head of Index here. We certainly do have our own index and it's one of the biggest among the independent players (i.e. not Google and Bing, which by the way closed off their official search APIs). [1]
Regarding the quality: search is a multi-dimensional problem, you can be better on one set of queries and worse on the other. There are tons of benchmarks in the industry, all the players in the AI search market are fighting very hard to climb to the top, updates are shared every week.
We track dozens of use cases and run evals continuously, we perform well on all the verticals we optimize for. Not only we top the ranking on e.g. financial queries, but also Claude with Exa search performs better that Claude with native search -- as measured by independent observers [2]. This means that the underlying search is materially better for the outcome, it's not just how we evaluate the search itself.
[1] https://lnkd.in/p/e9u3dyEG [2] https://lnkd.in/p/enYe4h7u