I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).
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
Same way people trust Microsoft: "We already use them, and using them for this additional service exposes no data they wouldn't already have access to from all the other services we buy from them"
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.
Cloudflare doesn't block bots. It's trivial to use residential proxies and your very obvious bot will only get blocked maybe 5% of the time when using rotating IPs.
For those developers out there, the best is still Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 believe it or not. It gives you 1000 google searches per day for free. Compare to Flash Lite 3.x which is 5k PER MONTH and then a few pennies PER SEARCH. Nuts. Didn’t realize search was so expensive.
Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
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
I hate to be rude but once again I am begging people to actually read the post. It is mentioned in the second paragraph that they are all verified bots.
My coding agent uses the hister cli, i.e. a local index. That often requires me to seed it manually as a downside. The upside is that it caches website contents via browser plugin, which is a nice workaround for bot blocking.
Tried one query on ceramic.ai (the default provider for cloudflare web search api): "qwen-3.8 flash next and rtx 5090 best inference setup" ... 0 results ... same query on google and ddg both yield proper results.
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.
You know the craziest part? This time I searched for their own website address: "ceramic.ai" .. results came... none pointing to the website or any page on it.
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 made a zero ads SERP using one of these "AI first" search providers: https://github.com/scosman/froogle (live version https://froogle.fyi). In this case Keenable.ai. Generally the same pattern: it's not usable.
A related Q: why are their products so popular? I get why CDN/DDOS protection is but what about everything else? I have never ever found a use for stuff like Workers. (Sincerely asking, not dismissing them as useless)
I suspect also to do with internal Slack etc. where employees vote on launch posts (a lot of them on HN since long). Not a scam or accusing anyone but this probably propels a lot.
Because it's their release week, so there's multiple new products every day. The overlap of people using HN and Cloudflare is pretty large, so not that surprising.
I guess I'm not understanding the value here - to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge. Appreciate new entrants in an existing field but not seeing this one.
>"to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge."
CloudFlare's entire business is scale, cost, and complexity. They are powering like half the web at this point. Wouldn't really call them a "new entrant".
Codex and Claude Code need to do countless web searches, I'd guess they have a partnership with Google. Open models don't have this partnership so the search API needs to come from somewhere.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
It’s really really good for low cost search!
Don't give them (G) ideas.
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
Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
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.
CloudFlare's entire business is scale, cost, and complexity. They are powering like half the web at this point. Wouldn't really call them a "new entrant".
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?
But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.
The absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.