If I'm running an agent system but I'm not allowed to store the responses - or provide a "share transcript" button - that's a pretty significant limitation.

The answer to that question is inevitably buried deep in the terms. Here's the relevant section I found for Ceramic, in their list of things you can't do:

> (n) collect, aggregate, store, or compile Output, including search results, relevance scores, or rankings, for the purpose of creating or contributing to any database, dataset, index, or corpus, whether or not such database, dataset, index, or corpus is used for a purpose that competes with Ceramic; (o) resell, syndicate, or otherwise make Output available to any third party on a standalone basis or as a separately accessible component of another product or service; provided that you may display Output to your authorized end users within your own application so long as such Output is integrated into your application's functionality, is incident to the end user’s real-time query, and is not independently accessible, extractable, or downloadable by end users or third parties; or (p) retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use, unless expressly permitted in an applicable Order Form.

https://www.ceramic.ai/terms-of-service

Am I alone in caring about this?

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!

MITM service, Internet gatekeeper and robber baron.

And then on the providers page:

    Property              Value
    provider              exa
    Zero Data Retention   No

Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

The providers[1] behind this Web Search API have very different rates:

    Ceramic.ai: $0.25 per 1,000 requests
    Linkup:     $5.00 per 1,000 requests
    Exa:        $7.00 per 1,000 requests

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/web-search/providers/

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.

1: https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi

https://github.com/hbmartin/agent-web-search

So this gives a unified search experience without adding another cloud hop and dependency.

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.

ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests

Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests

Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests

Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.

EDIT: formatting

But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.

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 absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.

As AI systems increasingly use search as a tool, the quality and reliability of that tool become an important part of the overall agent workflow.